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Puhelinahdistus | Isak Rautio Mikko Alasaarela | Neuvottelija 258 – Litterointi

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0:00 The entire mechanism of the game is based on a gambling-like addiction mechanism, and its only point is to get them to come about 10 times a day to do something in the game. Inward-turning, self-image-related mental health problems have also increased among boys. Well, these are typically more characteristic of young girls, but for example body dysmorphia—the fact that you see yourself in the mirror differently than you really are—for boys it might

0:24 be related to thinking your biceps are too small; these have increased. In practice, the algorithm's share is estimated to be about 80% of TikTok's total value. Well, so welcome to the Neuvottelija channel. I am currently in a guest location, at Isak Rautio's Futucast premises. Great to be here at your studio.

0:44 I used to be at that previous spot. Welcome here to our studio, and we're trying out a double episode, meaning at roughly the same time, we'll release loosely on the same topic. So, about the anxious generation. I don't know if we are an anxious generation. Mikko is almost my age, but Mikko Alasaarela is also here as a guest. Hello. Hi.

1:04 Nice to be here. But you're often up there; you started by being Finland's official TikTok whisperer, and nowadays you get to combine this with some kind of AI expertise. Well, yeah, I mean, this TikTok expertise actually stems from my focus on algorithmic influence, and when TikTok became this kind of the eye of the storm, so to speak, of algorithmic influence, it was clear as

1:33 day that my expertise and insight were needed there. Yes, and as a basis, we have studied this book by one of America's most qualified, sociologists, Jonathan Haidt's 'The Anxious Generation', and it's been quite an impactful work, so shall we start with some thoughts on it— will you start, Mikko, with what Jonathan Haidt said? Yeah,

1:58 so basically, there has long been talk that this current model of social media causes numerous negative developments in our youth; this has been discussed a lot, but researchers have always said in those discussions that, hey, correlation does not equal causation and The purpose of this Jonathan Haidt book was to show that there is

2:26 also a very clear causation between social media and smartphone use and the ill-being of young people. Yeah, what about Isak, you're not quite this anxious generation, meaning we're talking about people who weren't actually ruined because of COVID, but because of the phone. But you're a bit younger than us... so I was actually wondering before the episodes why I was invited here. You're like an algorithm scientist,

2:52 Mikko, and you've read this book, the podcast host, it's also true of me, my strongest theory right now is that you still think I'm 25— years old, I'm part of this anxious generation, I'm currently as an expert by experience—no, but I mean, it's probably good to say at the start that I don't have any professional qualifications to critique everything Haidt says in his book, but my bias towards Haidt is fairly positive, so I'm quite ready to receive his message. I think he's a good voice, a good addition to today's

3:22 discussion culture. This question seems very valid, and I think he's really good at bringing these opinions forward—so, just at the start, before we get into the real meat of the matter, it's perhaps good to say that I'm leaning, and my gut feeling at least leans a bit in the direction that Haidt might be quite right in some way. Yeah, and in that sense, it's a scientific book; he has written really good books before as well, well, on this

3:48 in a way, like, from the theory of people's political decision-making really great, fine analyses, I think this is quite quite like a science book, and in my opinion that initial thesis, that the mobile phone ruined the youth, well, it sounds true, in a way, since usually when it is then explained that, for example, COVID isolation ruined the youth. Well, here is a kind of simple correlation visible again. I was speaking there a couple of

4:18 years ago at the management days for Finnish university central hospitals' management teams about the impact of AI on their field of operation, and there they said themselves that adolescent psychiatric services' demand exploded completely exactly a year after smartphones became common among youth; this too is a correlation for which causality has not been scientifically confirmed, but it's not exactly very difficult

4:45 rocket science to understand that there may be something very concrete impact. Yes, and that is specifically where the data was, i.e.

4:53 mental health curves jumped. So first I thought—I have sometimes been critical, in a way, of this self-diagnosis and a certain kind of like woke culture's self-diagnosis, but well, this book, I think, convinced me that, well, it is quite true; I mean people have quite literally mentally, like, broken during this smart- phone era, so it's not just some kind of self-suggestion.

5:18 Should we already make some kind of distinction between Haidt's theses?

5:21 on the one hand, he talks about these harms of social media, that the lives of people and youth are on stage, so that a large audience—adults—see what they do, what they say, and it stays there forever, one can always go back and see what kind of person this was a few months or a few years ago, and it creates very specific pressures for young people to be a certain way, which is distressing and then on the other hand, as social media use increases, the more various other

5:48 childhood habits or ways of growing up are missed, and for example, this kind of lack of a play-based childhood—it's perhaps not a direct effect of social media, but a side effect of social media use having increased, and this too could—I don't know Is it then just a question of definition, but is this also a direct harm? Well, to that one could also add this perspective that for boys, this marginalization and addiction are also caused by games, so it's not just

6:18 this social media that causes these problems; we must take into account that it's several factors acting in the same direction. Yeah, on that I'm slightly of a different opinion. I mean, I am a man who has... I mean, with Tuomas Enbuske, in an episode, we pondered whether we are both sort of on some kind of neurodivergent spectrum; you could say, on the autism spectrum even, and this is a masculine

6:44 trait which involves some kind of structure and collecting or a longing for systemic detail, and games provide that to us, so I've...

6:55 made a bit of a reveal here myself, where I said that I...

6:57 have played through, for example, Baldur's Gate 3 on Honor Mode, simply because I thought it was a fun, compartmentalizable...

7:05 goal that gave me satisfaction, and I didn't feel like my world...

7:08 suffered from it in any way. Well, my view on that is that these games that can be...

7:13 played through are exactly those kinds of positively contributing games; then...

7:17 there are all these games, meaning 85% of all games, which are these free-to-play, never-ending gaming experiences where the entire game...

7:27 mechanism is based on a kind of gambling-like addiction mechanism, and...

7:32 its only point is to get them to come about x-x times a day to do something into the game, but Isak's point in a way about play—in my opinion, it was like more intense. There was this Taleb's antifragility theory. Meaning in a way, we have an anxious generation because it is a fragile generation because it hasn't been desensitized, so real, real, you know, rugged kids who have been put into nature and play and to take a beating and to fail a bit

8:02 and to take hits from the world and experience disappointments and boredom and these kinds of things that these curling parents have then removed from children, yes, but I can comment on the earlier part, I mean about games, my experience too is that I am a child of the internet even though I graduated from high school the same year when these hockey stick curves Haidt mentioned in young girls' mental health started to show, meaning the year 2012 when smartphones and social

8:30 media became part of young people's lives; I graduated then. But I have nonetheless grown up on the internet and I think I'm a relatively normal, well-functioning young person, even though many might say the internet raised me as much as my family raised me. I don't know if that's quite true, but I have, for example, as a 13-year-old seen a video where a man is murdered with a hammer online because back then there were these gore sites that all teenage boys went

8:56 to watch. That really shouldn't have been part of any young person's childhood, to see anything like that, and maybe now if I make this a bit of a As a side note, perhaps the observation there is that it's also a bit scary in its own way, is that how—of course it was shocking, I still remember, I haven't really forgotten it at all. I remember how shocking it was even then to see, but it would have probably been much more direct to see it live versus on video. That was a good point because this Jonathan Haidt says in his book

9:23 also that we, like, protect children to the maximum from these, like, real-world dangers that might be quite useful from the perspective of this growth experience, and at the same time we don't monitor the internet use, which might lead to the youth drifting into, like, all sorts of rabbit holes, like this kind of extreme violence.

9:45 of extreme porn, extreme views and things like that, and also then to genuinely unsafe places, for example, Snapchat, which pedophiles use very extensively for grooming children, and we don't recognize these kinds of dangers because it doesn't look dangerous when someone is staring at a phone. Yes, but let's move on to the girls' side; in a way, the dangers for girls are partly what

10:12 you're saying. There is sexual harassment and grooming, but there, social pressure plays out differently.

10:21 So in a way, boys are partly protected from that, even though boys also have harsh hierarchies that can be cruelly used for bullying and compared to others, for girls they are like particularly cruel. So in a way, those girls growing up on the internet have to face things in a completely different way, like pressure regarding appearance and, in a way, pressure for success and likes compared to boys. This is true, and social media has specifically that more harmful effect

10:49 on girls than boys from the use of social media, and it comes specifically through these distorted examples and, well, through these kinds of mental images that are not in any way based on this kind of normal life; as a consequence of this, you can see today even on the streets that these types of plastic surgery procedures to make one look more like some Instagram model are appearing among the youth

11:16 it has increased a lot, and probably specifically among girls Exactly, yes, but that's a harsh world and in a way then combined with that kind of constant pressure to be accepted 24/7 and in a way, in the social hierarchy, well, at least not bullied but preferably, well, like a popular girl, so it drives everything like anorexia and well weight control problems and other, well, really unhealthy things in a way

11:44 constant self-reflection through a negative lens, but without adding any kind of confrontation between young girls or between boys and girls here, this is just an observation I've made. I've done a bit of some kind of loose research for a possible project that relates to bodybuilding culture and relates to steroids and things like that steroid use among young people has increased and there are some vague now I've only read the headlines and abstracts, and even those maybe only halfway but it seems to be that these—I don't know if this is the right term—

12:11 internalizing mental health problems, like, inward-turning, self-image-focused mental health problems have also increased among boys; they are typically more characteristic of young girls, but for example, body dysmorphia—the fact that you see yourself in the mirror differently than you actually are, it might be related to being too small, so these things have increased, and again, I'm not drawing any correlation to anything, this is just an informal observation, but it does seem that way, and Haidt also writes

12:40 in his book, that social media affects young girls' self-image and mental health in a completely different way than boys; one such completely, like, not necessarily a model intentionally driven by social media platforms, but one that simply comes from algorithmic optimization, is that all our worlds drift in some direction as a result of those social media platforms trying to find us content they assume we like to watch.

13:06 And if you start watching a certain kind of content, just out of interest or curiosity, it might start feeding so much more of the same that you just drift in that direction because of its, like due to the original interest, and as a result, it is now visible in all Western countries, such a significant, for example, for girls and boys, divergence of worldviews, which is based exactly on this, that when boys are pushed content that is suitable for boys or seemingly

13:33 suitable for boys, and girls get girls' content, then we end up in these situations where the ability is no longer found to have a dialogue between these genders, as worldviews are seen to be so far apart that even heterosexual pairing is no longer realistically possible, and this has quite concretely manifested now in South Korea, where the differences are so large that

14:01 like, the goal for young people is no longer a heterosexual relationship. Yeah, and this divergence of worldviews has happened through an algorithmic, interest-based internet. Maybe Mikko could provide a little bit of insight into what this mentioned concept is. Yeah, so I delved into this algorithmic influence, actually, after I had been in Silicon Valley right during the explosion of the early phase of social media,

14:30 I was lucky enough to be around—was that picture of you real? Yeah, I actually thought it was a deepfake because you didn't really provide any background for it. Yeah, it wasn't a deepfake; I've hung around with Mark Zuckerberg and others in Silicon Valley—let's embed it in this video version.

14:46 listening to this, yeah, well, many, many people who knew and knew that I was hanging out there, they said that yeah, you really were hanging around with them. Not that too many people suspected it would have been an AI image because people knew I'd been hanging around in these circles. I thought that you heard or Mark got to hang out with Mikko with, but yeah, let's just say that these kinds of famous

15:14 entrepreneurs are more approachable when they aren't yet this rich and famous as they are now. For example, I went to dinner with Drew Houston, who is the founder and CEO of Dropbox, and others like famous entrepreneurs, hanging out with Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga, and although Who, well these well-known entrepreneurs, and I still say they were all back then a bit less well-known and a bit more approachable than they are today, but this conversation that I got to have with these

15:41 industry movers and shakers and those who actually made these bigger platforms in this game, it made me see the change that was happening, as I was right in the middle of that change myself, when these social applications and the like button were introduced, and like to Facebook, that’s when a wave started where all content on the internet became algorithmically curated. Meaning

16:07 Before that, you had, like, a Myspace page somewhere where you went to look at that page. It was like everyone had their own website, practically, and you'd always go to check if someone had updated something on that page. Then this algorithmic feed came along, and then content was selected for you that might interest you, and the like button works as a curation mechanism for that content, and this wasn't the only trend happening; similar trends were occurring

16:35 in all areas of digital content. We transitioned from buying a one-dollar song or a ten-dollar album on iTunes to a Spotify-style 'all-in' model.

16:48 we moved from video rental to Netflix, we moved from buying an Angry Birds-type game to Supercell's like, to that free-to-play world where you're made addicted to playing games for as long as possible. Many might think of someone who played Baldur's Gate 3 through with a one-time fee and it didn't do anything to you like this, it's just the same Sorry, but to continue, I saw that Angry Birds world where you bought a game as being so much healthier, like,

17:18 for youth because that gaming experience always has a beginning and an end and it's not like the goal becomes to leave you forever hooked in practice regarding these, and all these trends happened, like, around that time in a fast cycle there after 2010, here it was like in 2009 this came, the like button, it started to shift in this direction, social games came like on top of Facebook at first, then they moved to mobile, and now that it was mobile, then that mobile moved to the youth, so in 2012–13 this like

17:46 smartphone penetration among the youth like started an explosive growth, and we see like these big changes in such a way that for example the gaming industry moved from buying games to a free-to-play world like in one year, which was 2011, at the start of the year the share of free-to-play was 30 percent, and by the end of the year it was 70 percent of all games, today it is 85 M like, meaning 85% of all games that

18:15 there are like free-to-play addictive games basically, I remember...

18:19 from my own experience, when Facebook first came out and we logged in there, in my memory it was '08, uh, or '07, and well, uh, back then it felt much more strongly like a—what is 'supplement' in Finnish? So like an addition, it was like a way to live better in that high school reality, but still in that same old high school reality we had

18:46 there you could find out what homework—if we ever even talked about them— hypothetically was for the next day, who was single, who wasn't, where things were happening, like in the real world, and it didn't, like, suck you in as a new reality, but rather people went there as if to get more information about this actual reality; a lightly augmented reality, yes, yeah yeah, yeah, and now this development, when it started back then, it

19:12 moved forward over the years in a way that when the first wave had happened and the Facebook like button had arrived, then came this follower-based social media, shifting from a sort of friend-based social media, which was back then about creating a connection between two people where both see each other's content; we moved into following some influencer, and that's when the influencer market was born, meaning Instagram arrived, Twitter arrived, there were many other of these follower-based platforms, YouTube stars

19:41 the podcast, so basically you can follow it anyway. So, a side note here: we still appreciate it with Isak if you put both Fotocast and Neuvottelija on subscription; it still warms our hearts and the algorithm a bit.

19:53 Exactly. Yes, I mean on YouTube it still matters a bit that there are those followers—a big significance—so it's really worth subscribing because it has some impact for us. On TikTok, apparently, there is no longer a huge impact from those follower counts on the videos' reach, so it has moved purely to algorithmic social media, so basically this follower-based social media changed this social media dynamic to be less social because then you were no longer following your friends, so it—it doesn't

20:23 no longer just a place for finding friends, but it was a place for searching content from people who are entertaining and interesting, meaning celebrities and others who produce entertainment for you at a steady pace and, uh, then the next wave that followed this follower-based social media is this algorithmic social media, the TikTok world and in algorithmic social media, even that was taken away and it was just stated that it doesn't matter who you follow, we will definitely show you

20:52 the most addictive videos that can possibly be shown from all the content we have available on this entire platform in vertical video format there, and we offer it at such a pace that every 15 seconds. You get a new video in like an endless and like such a feed, they'll never end, you can watch it for as long as you want, you can spend your whole life on it and it still won't end, that, that like, that like like endless chain of videos, and TikTok started

21:20 to rise rapidly and eventually it happened that this TikTok's rise forced all other social media to join the same train because TikTok was quite clearly like beating them in like the metric of time spent, and that time spent metric directly translates into money like through ad revenue, and then like Instagram joined the race by changing their

21:45 content to be more algorithmic. Now this new Threads that came from Meta, well it's purely based on the 'for you' algorithm; in practice it has the option for the following feed, but I doubt many people actually use it, and then YouTube is now about 80% in that algorithmic recommendation mechanism. So following still has a small impact.

22:12 And the algorithm naturally recommends channels to you more if they are followed, but then now also well, X shifted purely to a 'for you' algorithm after Elon's purchase, and it has actually managed to make the feed a bit more addictive, although it's so full of filth.

22:31 the thing is, I don't really know, but you get addicted to like some quite strange things like fights, and even from that I always get like twenty thousand or so impressions just when I mention like Finland's high taxes, we revealed something from our own For You page, I don't know if this is like Elon's so personally tailored to preferences, but it's like a bit like you get addicted to some sort of B-movie where like unexpected twists happen all the time

23:00 Yeah, but how much, I mean TikTok was originally Musical.ly and they kind of started with like dance videos and kind of the utilization of the soundtrack so how much do you see or do you all see that with its a...

23:12 music, and that vertical video format and brevity have an impact. Are those the three most important sources of addiction then for that format, in a way? Well, the best thing about the short video format was that it was possible to very quickly teach the algorithm a massive amount of things about the user's own behavior, because when they are really short, you can go through, hundreds of videos in just a few hours, and based on that, you can

23:42 build good predictability for the algorithm regarding your own behavior, and as a result of that, this model has shifted and of course, when we talk about this kind of fast-paced cycle, people's brains starts to adapt to its fast-paced cycle so that we then have a kind of goldfish's attention span—like, we have this, our like, what we—patience decreases and our ability to focus weakens, but the ability to focus is still good enough, though, to be on those kinds of

24:10 platforms, so that the focus maybe, like, atrophies to just that kind of level. Yeah, but the point is that you have to be constantly fed new things, like this, so that you stay hooked, because if, if you get too long and boring stuff, then you can just close it and do something else. That music—in a way, I sometimes watch the Instagram feed without sound, but In a way, I mean, it probably mattered at first, it was those music dance challenges, and in a way, this challenge aspect has been part of it, and

24:37 in a way, some unifying genre, whether it was music or some other theme, so it's probably still at the core; well, that's the world it started from, indeed. But I would see it so that, yeah, I mean, TikTok is still used for music distribution, so TikTok actually makes agreements with these labels; they have built such a network of influencers where the influencers promise to promote things requested by TikTok in exchange for getting an algorithmic boost for their own videos.

25:06 And since they have this influencer network built behind it, they can basically lift any song to number one on the charts just by purely by just feeding the algorithm those types of TikTok videos to people where that song is featured, and we're probably heading to number one in any theme, let's move now perhaps over to the political side here, so in a way, according to one theory this is just like a culture war from the East to destroy, well, the West with a psyop

25:32 So in a way, this is part of a campaign where as much as possible destructive, self-destructive content is brought in and in a way we are ruined. Well, it's quite an easy conclusion because TikTok's content is banned in China and yet TikTok's content is curated in China, so it's quite a strange equation that that like Chinese censors are going through and editing that content there at the same time as it's not shown to their own people at all

25:59 shown, and then when a local version of it has been made whose content is very clearly healthier than what has been shown in the West, it's quite difficult to claim that there isn't intentionality involved, and this is precisely what makes it difficult to regulate, because when Trump first tried to ban TikTok in the US in 2020, and when a judge from Pennsylvania

26:26 rejected those two orders—and I don't know what they are in Finnish—Montana, as one state, decided that if the federal government doesn't handle it, if the president doesn't handle this, we'll handle it ourselves; we'll ban it ourselves, and they also referred to the fact that, uh, TikTok encourages young people to do all sorts of crazy challenges that have real-life effects. Let's go trip...

26:47 some random person on the street might hit someone on the head and cause harm, and what all sorts of other things; the record stated something about spreading feces on children or some other crazy things, and all that, but anyway, those one argument of the court—there are three points, but one argument was specifically that it can't be that all these are examples of expression that you don't like, so we consider them harmful, but

27:16 they are nevertheless examples of expression that is constitutionally protected in the US; you cannot refer to public discourse selectively by saying 'we like this' and 'we don't like this'—meaning, without other criteria, it isn't a sufficient criterion that you don't like it, even if there were information involved the influence side is then a separate national security-related argument that the federal government can make if it wants to pass a law banning TikTok; that's a separate discussion, but one that has indeed emerged with Biden

27:44 but this is difficult precisely because this is expression which for us is almost free, but there is also this side that there has been a lot of debate, like in the States, about whether algorithmic feeds are, in practice, curation decisions by these media platforms because, after all, media is under regulation because they choose for themselves what kind of news they show, so why do these social media platforms get off scot-free if they, in practice,

28:10 algorithmically decides what you see, Title 49 Section 230 Communications Decency Act, I think '97, it's that one section in it that defines that that a third-party platform like this cannot be treated as a content publisher, but they are content intermediaries, and this is exactly the law that has now been changed in Europe, I think through GDPR or the DSA, a change has come to this, so you can challenge or the Commission can ask, for example,

28:39 TikTok, like they have now, whether we have GDPR, has TikTok sent data to China that they shouldn't do, I think in Ireland there's a report coming this summer, some report on this, they will publish their information on whether they have misrepresented this, but now we can—meaning the European Union can—challenge to court. Look at these platforms, if we feel they are doing something illegal. Yeah, but that algorithm is interesting. I was listening there—sorry, regarding illegal expressions—

29:09 so Merja Ylä-Anttila, Yle's CEO, practically interviewed herself with a sympathetic Yle journalist, and I think there was a funny quote, that 'we tried this,' as Yle has also started collecting data on users by requiring a login, at least on some platforms, and she said that 'we tried—Netflix had a free algorithm, so we tried it, and it started offering way too much entertainment, so we have this better algorithm that provides education and culture to Finns.'

29:38 I got a bit of a feeling like, well, could that be published, and in a sense that it's quite rare to have been at Yle, but maybe I'd like to know how your, like, public edification practically happens; is it possibly politically guided? Because this always happens—someone defines it, like, how the people are educated or destroyed, and you can respond to that thought, but then the second thing is that we adapt ourselves to the algorithm. We talked about this

30:06 with Mikko in previous episodes, that even I, through this episode, partially—I'm not exactly censoring myself, but I am steering the angle of this discussion into an algorithm-friendly direction. So, two thoughts, or...

30:19 someone else decides on your behalf what is shown, and you as a content producer decide to adapt, and in a Venn diagram these probably aren't two separate circles because they probably adapt to each other in some way. You probably have some kind of interest, however, in building an audience, even though in our scene we talk about the term audience capture. It's maybe related to this in some way, but in that the external party isn't a platform, but rather the audience that gives you that validation or financial compensation or whatever else you want

30:48 from there, your clicks and volume. Yes, so then we get right into the raw grind. So if you want clicks and volume, in a way, fame and exposure, then you start playing by the rules of the algorithm.

31:00 and that was a good point, that we think that the users on those social media platforms are the ones who are, like, addicted to the algorithm's produced content, but that same algorithm actually also addicts the content creators so practically what happens is that in order for you to stay in the algorithm's favor, for example, or so that your content is visible on TikTok too you have to constantly produce new content that hits the algorithm, if

31:29 you leave a gap in between, it immediately weakens your, like, ranking and visibility in that whole system, and this has led to a situation where we have like millions of content creators in the world who have mental health problems because they've been caught in this kind of content creation hook they can't escape because of this, and this is also one of those problems that maybe isn't talked about as much because it's thought that the actual victims are the consumers and not so much

31:56 the content creators, but indeed, very negative developments also occur for the creators as a result of this algorithm. But if we take Isak's Venn diagrams and try to combine them, that's the solution being somewhat pursued in the States meaning that with this law, it's said that the algorithms will be taken from the Chinese and transferred to pure American ownership where then it can potentially be determined which ones are approved algorithm stuff and then let's take, for example, from Jonathan Haidt's, like,

32:24 antifragility box, and then remove the addictive junk and, dark patterns and addictive rabbit holes. Could this be one solution? TikTok gave, an answer. This has been suggested. This is what Biden has said now, that you must sell or then you'll be banned, and that selling scenario would likely lead to it being some US company. It can be some other suitably boring one, so yes, or I mean, in a way it can be any other country

32:50 than Iran, China, Russia, Venezuela, or North Korea that gets to buy the company or an entity from there. But likely it would be an American who would buy it if this were to happen. TikTok itself responded to it, I think.

33:03 that, that, well of course they consider it fundamentally wrong, well we have interests in it to uphold, the arguments were that [Music] related to this was that, well, this recommendation algorithm is such important and secret information, meaning for our business that it wouldn't be legally, technically, or politically possible, especially in this time window given to us

33:30 and then I think the Communist Party also said that we won't agree to this they actually made a law in China against that, saying that like TikTok's viewing data, i.e., the data they have on what people see, plus this algorithm, whatever it is, cannot be taken out of the country, and this now it's crystal clear they're also covering their own asses in that, if this data went [there], it would be possible to investigate what all has been done here and I don't believe China wants it to be investigated, so if someone

33:58 buys it, someone basically has to train the algorithm from scratch and practically the algorithm's share is estimated to be of TikTok's entire value about 80%, so the company's value isn't necessarily even very high compared to what it is with the algorithm, so without it, it's totally possible that if someone buys it, then its popularity will collapse as a direct result, yes, but there's also that political friction involved, and I just remember seeing somewhere that

34:25 well, compared to Instagram, for example, well, this kind of Israel-Hamas memeing there's like ten times more of it for girls than on Instagram, in a way there's an attempt, like, quite tactically to, well, ruin the girls or at least radicalize them into a certain political angle useful for China political angle, and naturally, such things are not wanted, well, or then, of course, the Uighur situation is a total no-brainer, it gets blocked out of there

34:52 so yeah, but then again, a U.S. court said that this is not okay we can't just start banning based on the message restricting—it's not—it's an unconstitutional argument if referring to some specific message like, 'hey, there's communism here' or something like that, or then this platform exception will also be removed in the US. So, well, which hasn't really ever even existed in Europe, this platform protection

35:20 for freedom of speech. Well, in practice, the US can't even very easily...

35:24 like, from the angle of addiction or youth harm, even...

35:29 ban it, because they would then practically have to ban Instagram and YouTube as well, but they can raise the national security perspective because there's a crystal-clear argument that from their perspective you basically have an enemy state which manipulates the algorithm; there's enough evidence for everyone that this has happened, giving it the opportunity to spy on everything at the same time.

35:52 what happens in the U.S. and affects the entire conversation. What happens in the U.S.

35:55 happens—yes, it is true, and so now that the federal government is forced to make those arguments again—updated versions of those arguments from 2020 which were made during Trump's time, it may well be that it reveals something new. They might have also had a bit of an idea there of not wanting to reveal absolutely everything that China is able to do with this. And maybe in 2020, everything wasn't quite known yet about how this has had an effect. But, but yeah, I wouldn't start either. I watched a Legal Eagle video, which is a really

36:23 good channel, actually. It does good public education like this, but nevertheless, in my opinion, quite good assessment of these things, even though—well, a lawyer.

36:30 like about legal issues regarding the US and he also said that I would be against the US government when arguing about national security, meaning national security, National Security is such a strong argument for the federal government at that level that I wouldn't start arguing against it, but well Did I have—go ahead J, if, if we think about it like, what if now Russia made, for example, a kind of propaganda TV channel whose task is

36:57 to brainwash the inhabitants of some country towards a certain stance, then it would be banned quite easily when it is in a state of war with an actor like that, so in practice with the very same arguments, you can ban this kind of, in quotes, social media, I actually call TikTok and the kind of social media that use algorithmic feeds as their main distribution channel 'anti-social media,' because it reduces social interaction rather than increasing it, and it

37:23 shifts your time and attention away from social interaction to the consumption of entertainment, and if we look at, for example, this Gallup study from last autumn regarding the time use of American teens, where 4.8 hours a day on average is spent by teens on this kind of social media, of which 4.3 hours is spent on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram—so if that time is now practically spent mainly watching short videos, then indeed

37:53 quite a few hundred short videos per day, per person, are being consumed there.

37:56 ...as teens, and then we think about what is being dropped in there, whether...

38:01 ...something like educational things come through, or things that distract...

38:04 ...away from learning or some kind of development; are sensible...

38:08 ...images given of what a healthy and good life would be, or do...

38:12 ...distorted images of what you should be come from there, and now if we combine...

38:15 ...these things, that such a large part of people's waking hours has been taken, stolen for that use, then it really should go toward a very...

38:23 positive purpose, or if it doesn't, then we have to be...

38:26 really careful about whether we actually want this to happen, but what...

38:31 do you think about the argument that people present for this?

38:34 that this ban is an easy way to somehow solve this or try to fix this problem, but it doesn't answer the actual question, which is this kind of lack of a comprehensive federal-level data privacy law. Every state probably has some data privacy of its own, some murky GDPR-like

38:58 setup that differ from each other, but there's nothing covering the US as a whole which also leads to the fact that even if TikTok were banned, nothing per se prevents ByteDance from buying that data from the market from third parties that sell that data as a business, so if they wanted to use the data that social media collects, what other social media collect, Instagram, Facebook, all these.

39:22 The American founders. They could in principle buy it. Well, nowadays, when everyone has locked down all their APIs and in practice prevented scraping as a result of this AI training. So when it's been noticed that OpenAI and everyone else have collected all the data from the entire internet and made a model out of it, there aren't many companies left that have things openly visible on the web that have any value in terms of data, like these Reddits and others, they are all under lock and key now, and then that data

39:52 is sold to these operators separately through a commercial deal.

39:56 In this regard, I see that such a large-scale data collection operation is realistically not nearly as possible as it was with that kind of with a direct app relationship, you really... it is like much, much more efficient and like, a better way to collect data than trying to get it through some other ways, the same—that's, by the way, I don't know if people in the media understand like, in a way, precisely this transition from this, well, to an interest-based Internet, like from this kind of broadcast-based media and

40:26 in a way, then people still very much kind of thought in terms of links, that when I share my great article link here in, well, Hesari, then a huge amount of traffic will come here—like, in a way, those the death of those link bridges has also, in a way, gone kind of, in a way, unnoticed by that, like, traditional broadcast media and then, in a way one doesn't realize how weak those traditional media are as platforms like even Yle, which receives 595 million euros in funding, which is

40:53 a staggering amount, yet is still just one measly little portal that in a way isn't very popular, even though you, Mikko, have been there several times, not very popular in a way among younger generations among them, so in a way these become these kinds of islands and in a way you need some kind of business card, maybe the modern-day link is a 20-second captioned short video, for this episode too I'm going to make those business cards with which

41:21 they replace the link because you can't really jump anywhere with a link anymore anywhere, but in a way, this kind of vague, interest-based internet where bridges are no longer built, but instead, content is just thrown at everyone and floats before your eyes—so about that, AI is going to change this, in my opinion—that's my thesis. How? Well, when GPT-4o now uses multimodality, it's starting to become

41:49 potentially so addictive that you can create a very charming avatar for it that talks exactly through your curated bubble so addictively. This leads us to the point where we can actually move toward Jonathan Haidt's solutions, continuing with the idea that things were better before, toughening up youth by playing in parks and removing their phones until they are 16 and, well, put them in locked cabinets and set up like a verified identity with bank IDs, so my

42:15 not dystopian but optimistic view is that the AI interface will be so much more addictive than this short video that it saves the youth and also me and you and you. Well, it would require that we well, first of all, the human mind is such that we seek out this kind of entertainment and time- wasting quite easily, we gravitate toward content that

42:44 is funny or otherwise entertaining in some way or somehow intriguing, if we were to ask to guide it through these kinds of avatars into such an educational and useful and helpful direction, that would be really positive. I'm not yet quite sure whether the very best and most popular avatars will be like this, or if they will be what currently sells best, so for example in the AI friend

43:11 sector, the biggest market right now is this kind of conversational porn, so the main point of these models is to remove the barriers of current models to talk about sexual topics in chat, after which it has been possible to monetize this kind of AI girlfriend or other such purpose; it's Now, now, the best-selling and most money-making model, well, my blackpill and my whitepill, meaning my cynical and optimistic view, is a bit

43:39 similar too, that the worst is a world where we isolate ourselves even further and all our interaction happens with some kind of well, large language model, and well, we isolate ourselves from other people simply and get even more hooked. The whitepill that I heard somewhere, that optimistic view, hopefully at least some people would start using AI in this way, and it's such that it could become like that, depending on the interface of course. But for example, social

44:07 situations, for many people who aren't very used to them, might be really difficult, and you can't do dry runs of them, so if you haven't been desensitized as a youth, exactly, so if you haven't really been desensitized as a youth then learning them later might be more difficult, especially with people who have already learned those subtle ways to be and live and feel and express, but if you have to take a bit of a step back, if you have to practice them specifically, then why not use

44:36 some invisible AI, visible and audible and tangible only to you, as a partner, as a sparring partner in these situations to augment your real life experience and those skills. This is the dream where I hope AI could go. What if it then leads to someone saying something to you, then after that saying, wait a moment and then your assistant tells you what you need to say back so that

45:03 things rock. I don't know, it's quite—assistive intelligence is quite a legitimate training wheel. It could be afterwards, or maybe the, maybe the interaction would happen somehow, but this is like the Terminator just having better jokes in real-time, thinking there while explaining, 'now you should' 'ask this.' It might have analyzed your banter and would tell about this next. I was a young entrepreneur back in the early 2000s, it's been a long time, there was this American mentor, Bill Paulin,

45:31 you might even know him from those years, but anyway, with him So I learned how to do business in the States, and we went to meetings there, and he acted as a kind of cultural interpreter for me, meaning we always did a prep session before the meeting where we went through the ways people react in the States and in a situation and such. We did the meeting; we had agreed on a certain kind of signal to indicate that things were heading in the wrong direction.

45:57 So Bill might scratch his ear or tap the table or just something like that, which others didn't notice, but I knew that now it had gone in a bad direction. Then I'd give the floor to Bill and he'd take the ball and I could like, fix the situation, and then after that, always after the meeting so then we sat down and went through what went well here and what went poorly, and I learned very quickly that cultural bridging, like into that environment, this kind of Finnish culture; I was thinking that that type of assistant could be

46:23 very useful, for example, in bridging intercultural differences and such, because that could be done quite efficiently with AI in my opinion. Yes, indeed. Yes. Great, let's include here at the end this Jonathan Haidt's book's, like, recommendations from it; it sounded like: no phones for under-16s and you gain access using bank credentials, so it sounded like that game was already lost, but that sort of exposure, that you kick

46:52 your kids, well, out to play in the real world and take some knocks like we did before, so it sounded sensible. In my opinion, that mobile phone ban during the school day is a really good idea, like not taking it away completely but putting it away just when you are in a learning situation and a social situation with other young people and children where during breaks you play with them and stay focused in class without those distractions on the lesson, then your learning outcomes will go back to being good, which are currently significantly weakened in all schools precisely because of this

47:21 mobile phone distraction. And then at the same time, social skills get to to develop during the school day, like while playing and scuffling there, like but whatever, the point is that when time is spent with other young people then these very useful human abilities emerge, and then after you go home, if you want to spend the whole rest of the evening scrolling through TikTok, then fine, but at least you got that school day's worth of a break from it. Mmm, it's an interesting question, I

47:48 agree with that, that would surely be quite good. The question is probably how that is achieved. Is it achieved through legislation or this kind of, like, collective action so we can agree together... having been out talking, like, with the directors of education of such large cities on this topic and such projects are already being launched; after all, in all elite schools, they have already moved in that direction—meaning those schools that want the best results do it anyway, because they know it has

48:17 a direct impact on learning outcomes. That is a good question, that a phone ban during lessons is much easier to achieve than it being banned throughout the school day, but I think it would be really important to include breaks as well, so that we could foster the growth of social skills among the youth. Yes, that is probably a pretty big thing too, Haidt speaks a lot about that, that playful childhood and specifically the value of risk-taking in youth. I don't know if this relates to this at all, but

48:45 this sounds like a fun podcast observation that's worth sharing. I was hosting an event last week and there was this chief physician as a panelist in one of the discussions, and we somehow just I just asked a basic small talk question about the gig, like, 'Are you a bit nervous?' We talked about it, like, 'Well, not really, but in a positive way, a bit nervous,' and how before going on stage you feel it a bit. Then he made this observation: 'I’ve actually noticed that many young people nowadays use the word "anxious" when they talk about nervousness or those kinds of

49:13 situations where I would use the word "nervousness," they use the word anxious, then someone made a comment, or I kind of nodded to them, 'What a good observation.' Yeah, and then someone suggested, 'But I wonder if it’s just a distinction made in the Finnish language, for example in the US or UK. I mean, sorry, 'anxiety' is closer to the word 'ahdistus', but it also includes the word 'jännitys' slightly. I don't know if 'jännitys' and 'tension'

49:40 are, for example, exactly the same thing. Then another word used to describe 'jännitys' is also 'excitement', which is a totally different thing in my opinion, but how we [view] this observation that, like, fundamentally even 'ahdistus'—at least this kind of 'anxiety'—might even be a positive feeling, so sometimes it can be a bit like stress; in the best-case scenario, they are those kinds of internal impulses to do something, to make some change, I am in bad circumstances, now I could do something about this, and this bad

50:08 feeling triggers it in me, so the emotional map is quite valid, I remember sometimes, well, sometimes 20 years ago there was this like NLP was such a big thing so there we just learned these kinds of, well, in a way like masking emotion, emotion cascades, so you can be excited that you're nervous that you're taking a risk, so this is like, you can like chain positive and negative and all sorts of emotions, making them

50:36 excitingly new, yes. Yeah, and I don't know if this is a bit like boomer-ish guesswork. It might well be, coming from my mouth. That's what it is, but maybe someone can support this, that, that, that, that, that... Are we fundamentally more inclined to see anxiety always as a negative thing? I mean, I've researched a lot into the emergence of different kinds of language in these kinds of bubbles, internet bubbles, and how that language is born, like, from that bubble's way of communicating among themselves. So when people bubble into different places, they

51:06 also develop a mutual way of communicating there, and when you can simulate it well enough, you can appear as one of the bubble members on the internet, in any bubble, even if you weren't in it, and I've utilized this quite successfully in my own communication on the internet, so that I can sort of pull people from different bubbles into the same conversations by dropping their own kinds of keywords for both parties and and these kinds of ways to communicate, and because people are blind to everything except

51:33 their own communication, they don't see that communication directed at others as well as the communication that hits home, so in that sense well, it's certainly completely possible, for example, that just this kind of anglicism that has come from somewhere for the youth inside a certain bubble has in some bubble already turned into anxiety as a word fundamentally, so that it has been visible in that bubble, it has like

51:58 influenced their way of communicating, and we are these kinds of, well, in a way one of our main mechanisms is that we have, like, Theory of Mind or, well model of the world, so you can glaze it with emotion, and I myself often for example, often say that it's never too late to have a happy childhood, that you can, like, quite easily gild any memory with some enthusiastic emotions if you just decide, but usually people like end up

52:24 finding, through a negative or angry or anxious culture, just crap even from memories. Yeah, that's a good point.

52:32 actually, you hear this, it's quite a common counter-argument, people who feel that we're exaggerating nowadays—we, collectively, are exaggerating social media's harms, and by focusing on this so strongly, we close our eyes to the fact that a climate crisis and wars are happening in the world right now around, and well, what else...

52:53 inequality and Chinese influence through TikTok, all that kind of stuff, and this answer—whoever says it—reflects, of course, quite a lot fundamentally what biases they see in the world, in which direction their gaze is tilted; that these are the biggest problems at this moment. Of course, it’s perhaps good to note fundamentally, but it doesn't mean, however, that the mechanism beneath it would be completely

53:19 uh, useless or completely insignificant. I mean, the fact that we have more information, and we have this somewhat distorted but still surprisingly close lens on the world's problems, a bit like what we discussed.

53:35 at first, the problems of your own inner circle and immediate circle and others somehow seem distant; we protect children from them, but then at the same time the whole world's and world history's problems and the major political questions and injustices are right there on the screen, and often messaged in a way that you have some small part in this, or at least

54:03 your passivity is a sign that you don't care, or something like that. That's a very valid point, so in practice, like, yeah, we need to be really concerned about the problems of climate change, but do we need to make an entire generation of youth living in climate anxiety, like, did it have to be turned into anxiety and was there any benefit to it?

54:23 like in problem solving, these are quite good if no tools are given for living or functioning with it; good stuff, so since you've watched or listened this far, then go ahead and put this 'Neuvottelija' on subscription; even if Mikko says so, there is still significant benefit, but the most benefit is if you put into Google or another search engine field, Isak Rautio, Mikko Alasaarela, and then Sami

54:50 Miettinen separately, press enter, and only after that press these episodes, and then I would also hope that those of you who want to obey these commands so much, would also watch Isac Rautio's Futucast episode where we have this same conversation, but likely from a completely different angle, thanks for visiting, and I suggest I'll take five more minutes our current usage and AI just for this Insider side

55:16 because I have the part where followers are truly beneficial, meaning the paying Neuvottelijat subscribers, because even Google's interests won't destroy it because they also get money from it, so let's jump over to the Insider side Thank you for visiting. Thank you, thank you.