Why Mighty Monk?

Every day we spend many precious hours on Facebook, Instagram, or any other social website doing nothing useful. So, do I want you to wake up, quit all social websites, and become a monk? Nope. We do need entertainment and there’s no harm in it, but it is equally important to understand and acknowledge the point when the social websites start using us for their own benefits. Am I exaggerating? Read the facts in the next paragraphs and decide for yourself.

How social media manipulates us?
Let’s begin with a simple question. Is Earth flat or (almost) round? Round right, but still many believe it to be flat because the internet makes them believe so. NBA star Kyrie Irving said “the Earth is flat” and many kids believed him. Why did he believe so? Is he a fool? NO. The Youtube rabbit hole made him believe it. The Youtube algorithm kept on showing him videos that “Earth is flat” and with each day his belief became strong.

Moving to another example of the Facebook-Cambridge data scandal. If you haven’t heard about it yet, you are missing something big. Cambridge Analytica created an app that made people login through Facebook and collected the personal data of the users and their friends. The app consisted of a series of questions to build psychological profiles of users and then used it to provide assistance to the 2016 US presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. For example: using your data the app realized that you are an emotional person, thus it would show you videos like “an emotional appeal to vote for Trump”. The app harvested the data of up to 87 million Facebook profiles and ultimately Trump did win.

Why should you care?
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc. don’t want money from us, they want our attention, and advertisers pay them for it. The goal of each of these sites is to make us stick to them and the AI algorithm tries hard to achieve it. With each passing day, the algorithm is becoming stronger by using our data. So, how will you fight it? The more you use, the more you lose.

Thus there is a dire need to protect our data and live a healthy “real” life, and Mighty Monk aims to help you in doing that. Through this article, we have only touched the tip of the iceberg but there is more underneath which we would keep covering in upcoming articles. If you still think we are exaggerating, we suggest you watch “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix where developers from Google, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. have acknowledged it too.
Check out Mighty Monk at: medium.com/mighty-monk