Algorithmic manipulation and psychosocial bias in social networks

Abstract

The traditional and critical conception of manipulation is often reductive and simplifying, but is now re-emerging with emerging technologies. However, in the face of the manipulation of the real or vicarious other induced by algorithmic bias, there is also our individual or psychosocial bias. It is undeniable that the capacity for real manipulation has been immeasurably enhanced by some use of social networks, but it has operated, at times, on pre-existing bias tendencies. Social and communicational problems have acquired such a high degree of complexity that they demand, now more than ever, the abandonment of any kind of monocausalism and determinism. Without subscribing to a naive thesis of technological neutrality, we can say that social network platforms are multivalent and merit alternative management modalities, with algorithms that incorporate other data and other instructions.