2 Policy Brief No. 22 Toda Peace Institute/Alliance for Peacebuilding • Social media profit motives. Social media corporations harvest data on users to create psychometric profiles that are then sold to advertisers with interests in persuading and manipulating the public toward specific goals. Social media corporations are driven by profit; they sell the attention of users to advertisers. • Brain hacking for Addiction. Social media companies compete for user’s attention. They have a profit motive to keep people using and sharing information on social media platforms. They design these platforms to foster greater use, what some refer to as "brain hacking." • Monetizing and Grabbing Attention. In the “attention economy,” social media platforms attempt to harness and monetize our attention by tech creating psychologically addictive programs that “hijack” attention. When users share information, they “harvest” these psychological profiles through a range of information-gathering surveillance. They then they sell this personal information to corporations and political actors with interests in persuading and manipulating the public toward specific goals. • Hate Spreads Faster than Truth or Love. Social media platforms algorithms prioritize posts that contain strong emotions, spreading them to others. Research by the Wall Street Journal discovered that YouTube’s algorithms more often recommended “conspiracy theories, partisan viewpoints and misleading videos” over more reputable but “boring” videos representing fact-based reporting. (Nicas 2018) • Affirmation Addiction. Humans crave attention and connection. Social media offers instant gratification for social affirmation. MRI brain scans illustrate that feedback via social media activates the “reward center” of the brain in a way similar to addictive drugs. (Wolpert 2016) • Emotional Reactions, not Deliberation. Social media’s “race to the brainstem” makes complex thinking more difficult. Democratic deliberation, critical thinking to determine fact from fiction, and creative problem-solving takes place in the frontal cortex, behind the forehead. The frontal cortex is essential to building society, analyzing public problems, and creating solutions and innovations to improve social and political goods. In the midst of conflict and trauma, more primitive and emotion-based neurological systems tend to take over. Ironically, the more chaos and conflict that there is in society, the less able humans are to respond with the part of their brain that might enable them to reduce chaos and violence. Summary of Social Media Opportunities Starting in the late 1990s, many people believed social media could improve social and political goods by connecting and empowering people and improving access to information. Today, nearly half of the people on the planet use social media to exchange ideas, photos, and videos. States and civil society organizations are using social media for a