Social media exploits our preferences: A teaser.
Seemingly, social media gives us liberty to create our own content, network with others, discuss hot topics, follow trends, find entertainment – all this being designed to fit our fine taste. The product is an ideal environment. An environment in which we like to spend our time (otherwise, we would be doing someting else).
Simultaneously, social media can be thought of as a space that exploit every perceptual and behavioural bias of the human mind and does so as far as it gets. As a researcher, who came from postneodarwinist school of biological evolutionary studies, I am sceptical towards treating evolution as an algorithmic process that simply takes inputs (data), runs them through a set of predefined steps, and returns somehow altered “future state of a population”. The characteristic, which distinguish life from this process, is life itself. Do not blame me for vitalism. Let’s say that I believe in emergent characteristics. Life as an unique, unreducible emergent characteristic of living creatures.
However, if there was an environment in which living individuals become exposed to products of painstaiking, ruthless selection, the one imagined by authors of darwinist synthesis in the mid-20th century, it should be the internet.
Before detailing the processes, which will be subject of future contributions, let’s bring two theoretical arguments:
(1) People, as any other species, created the environment to which they are adatapted the most. There is a concept of ecological niche – a surroundings, specific position in the complex natural habitats every species is condemned to stick to (or either extinct or adapt once again differently). However, there is no reason to imagine an outern (f)actor responsible for this specialisation. The species may construct its niche, according to its very extended phenotype, and subsequently adapt to that niche. Potentially, social media, as an extension, specific manifestation of our tendency to establish societies, are just a late bloom of the niche-constructing tendency.
(2) The latter argument is going to be a metaphor, and it limps like metaphors do: However, selection (or sorting, second member of the pair which differences will we define only later) can only act when there is a lot of variance in a lot of individual agents and a lot of rounds (which is referred to as time). Selection is just one of the mechanisms that may cause anagenetic change of living species. It does not even optimise, but it somehow results in adaptation. A species – become – adapted – to its niche. That said, if a lot of individuals produce a lot of content, if the content is diverse and if there a constant negotiation between algortihms and consumers, we should get stimuli that fit our constructed niche the best.
Summing up: Internet, and, specifically, social media, fit suprisingly well into both contexts: They can be imagined as an extension, continuation of human sociality, and the algorithms may exploit the provided variance, minding human preferences, to the greatest possible degree, providing a content we like so much that once we get in touch with that, we would fear to miss it in the future.
In the following posts, we will focus on other important concepts from human evolutionary psychology that inspired hereby presented thinking. Firstly, we will talk about facial preferences – and their potential adaptive value. Next, we will focus on the societal size and level of interconnectedness as an important, and perhaps decisive, aspect of today’s human facial preferences. In the subsequent chapter, we will review literature that associates facial preferences and mass media.
Written on the 10th of November, 2025, edited on the 11th as I spotted some typos here & there.