The minute you stop scrolling, they lose money.

All their algorithms are designed with literally one goal.

What will keep you scrolling?

That's it.

That's the goal, right?

So as the algorithms and the AI were figuring out what keeps people scrolling, they bumped into, they uncovered a human quirk, which is not the intention of anyone at Facebook or YouTube or any of these places, which is called, it's a very well-documented psychological phenomenon called negativity bias, which is basically means we will stare at something negative longer than we will stare at something positive.

Anyone who's ever been driving down the motorway and passed a car crash knows exactly what I'm talking about.

You stare at the car crash longer than you stare at the pretty flowers on the other side of the road, right?

And this is, negativity bias goes very deep. 10 week old babies will stare longer at an angry face than a smiling face.

But when this meets algorithms designed to maximize the harvesting of attention, this produces a catastrophic effect.

And this was, this is not my view.

This is what Facebook itself found in its own internal research, which we've now had leaked.

Imagine a teenager, group of teenagers go to a party.

One of them goes home and on the bus on the way home, they say, that was a really lovely party.

I enjoyed it.

Everyone looked great.

And they were so nice.

Another teenager from the same party posts, God, Karen looked like a right slag tonight.

Her boyfriend, Jim is a twat.

What does the algorithm do?

The second one is more like the car crash.

People will stare at it longer.

The algorithm will promote it in the feed.

It will put it much higher.

The nice one, that's going to be way down if anyone sees it, right?

The algorithm select for anger because anger will keep you scrolling, right?

This was inherent to the Facebook business model.

And the only alternative was for Facebook to abandon its business model and adopt what they called an anti-growth model where they said, we won't grow as a company, but we won't set the world on fire, right?

The Wall Street Journal who got leaked it.

They said, their new story said, after he received this report, Mark Zuckerberg asked that he never be brought any reports like this ever again, right?

So, you know, they know what they're doing.

They're tied to their business model.

They're only going to stop doing it when we make them.

But this machinery that is amping us up into anger, firstly, it destroys attention.

When you're angry, it's much harder to pay attention.

We've all had that experience, but also it's devastating for the society.

And we've got to deal with that.

At the moment, if you've got all these smart engineers and they've got one incentive, how do I take Stephen's attention the absolute most I can, right?

They don't work for you, but they work for the advertiser.

You have to change the incentives and then they will do it.

When the incentives change, then obviously their behaviour changes, right?

If they want to please you rather than pleasing the advertiser, then of course the market will then provide all sorts of ways.

At the moment, the competition is how do I maximally invade your attention?

If we move to a new business model, the competition is what does Stephen actually want?

If Stephen wants to know where his friends are so we can have a drink with them, okay, give him that button.

What else does Stephen want?

Stephen wants to meditate.

Oh, we'll give him that button.

You can see how once they're figuring out what you want, not what the advertisers want, then of course the market begins to experiment and there'll be a thousand innovations.