10 Policy Brief No. 22 Toda Peace Institute/Alliance for Peacebuilding Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media. (Gillespie 2018) The public’s loyalty to a social media platform requires trust that users will not unintentionally encounter pornography, hate, or violence while scrolling through their news feed. Negative stories about social media’s role in undermining elections and fostering extremism from 2016 to the present also impacts public loyalty. For example, Facebook lost $118 billion of stock value in July 2018 following news stories of the company’s anti-social roles. (Solon 2018) 14. Government Surveillance. In telling the story of how social media works, some point to the history of the development of the internet and the world wide web. Walter Isaacson details the “creative collaboration” between the military, academic institutions, industries, and a group of progressive and libertarian freethinkers in his book, The Innovators. (Isaacson 2014) The U.S. military helped to create the internet to enable communications in the event of a widespread attack or disaster. Some assert the military also had an interest in designing a communication platform that would enable intelligence collection on populations so that it could identify threats. Some researchers note that "No matter what we use the network for today—dating, directions, encrypted chat, email, or just reading the news—it always had a dual-use nature rooted in intelligence gathering and war”. (Levine 2018) Today it is no secret that government’s spy on their citizens through social media platforms. The number of requests by governments to Facebook for user data is steadily increasing as states learn about Facebook’s psychometric profiling data. Facebook’s April 2018 Transparency Report reports that over 100 countries made over 80,000 information requests to Facebook between January 2013 and April 2018. (Facebook. 2018) Today, millions of people upload photos to social media every day. These photos, paired with facial recognition technologies, create intelligence data for spy agencies tracking people. For states focused on human security and combatting crime, such surveillance might improve public safety. But for governments focused on concentrating wealth and power, such surveillance undermines democracy. Neuroscience and the Appeal of Social Media Neuroscience is an interdisciplinary study of the brain and nervous system. Researchers use neuroscience to understand how humans feel, think, and behave. Neuroscience is essential to appreciating the psychological appeal of social media. 15. Social Media Noise. Social media vastly increases the amount of information available to people. Getting attention is difficult given this overwhelming information “noise.” Techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci observes, “In the 21st century it is the flow of attention, not information (which we already have too much of), that matters.” (Tufekci 2018)