Welcome to Unmoderated Insights!
What is Unmoderated Insights?
Unmoderated Insights is a newsletter for smart people who prioritize data over dogma, and who prefer to understand what we know (and don’t know) about the relationship between people, society, and technology.
Why?
Understanding human behavior and thought is complicated enough even in the absence of other people, let alone in hyperconnected social networks that use fancy math and engineering to feed people content. When phenomena are complex, people are more accepting of simple stories regardless of whether they are true. We start assuming there is some simple cause for the complicated thing that we dislike. We start seeing relationships between events and assuming one of those things caused the other.
Kids these days spend more time playing with their smartphones than I did when I was a kid, so any problems affecting kids obviously is caused by that screen in front of them. Right?
Kids these days spend so much time playing realistic, violent video games instead of the pacifying Mrs. Pac-Man I grew up playing. Obviously, violent video games are what is causing school shootings. Right?
Many Western countries are more politically polarized today than in decades past. Obviously, this is because inequality rose and ignited class conflict. Or… obviously because it is now possible to stream news 24/7. Or… obviously because fundraising trumps seniority in political campaigns and committee assignments. Or, obviously because of social media. Right?
Of course, the answer to these questions is not a simple yes or no.
However, when people write popular press books, go on television, and loudly advocate for these simple, incorrect theories, they end up enriching themselves while harming those they claim to be concerned about (children, citizens, people who happened to be born as members of historically underrepresented groups, [insert paternalistically-determined victim group here]). Initially, the harm caused is subtle. Companies, elected officials, media, and the general public are distracted and scramble to find a solution for what they think is causing some unwanted outcome, instead of actually figuring out what the causes are, and how best to mitigate them.
The goal of this newsletter is to help sift through all of the noise, find the signal, and then use that to address the problems facing the world today by building better products and writing better policies.
Who?
Dr. Matt Motyl has spent the past 20 years studying human social behavior and statistics. After getting his PhD in social/political psychology at The University of Virginia, he accepted a tenure-track professorship at the University of Illinois and published 60+ peer-reviewed scientific articles and book chapters on:
How people are motivated to confirm whatever they want to believe (even if it’s misinformation)
How scientists torture data so that their “findings” do not reflect the reality of whatever it is they claim to be studying
What makes it so difficult for people to have constructive conversations on important topics, like politics and religion
How technology affects democracies
Why people believe conspiracy theories
His work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC, CBS, and many other outlets. He’s published numerous thought pieces in places like Time Magazine and the Los Angeles Times.
In 2019, Matt was recruited to be a senior researcher at Meta working on safeguarding the US 2020 Presidential Election, led numerous companywide initiatives on improving how ranking algorithms handled civic and health content, improving how comments are ranked in service of promoting healthier conversations, building COVID-19-related machine learning models, and building features that improved the artificial intelligence system used to evaluate all user-generated content for its likelihood of being harmful before it would be posted.
Upon leaving Meta in 2023, the University of Southern California’s Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision-Making invited Matt to be a Senior Adviser and run a new set of longitudinal and nationally representative surveys of US adults regarding their experiences with the most popular social media platforms, artificial intelligence tools, and mixed reality devices. Matt is also a Resident Fellow of Research & Policy at the Integrity Institute and a Subject Matter Expert at Duco. In his ample spare time, he advises the US Senate ahead of its hearings with technology company executives, numerous US State Attorneys General, the European Union’s commission overseeing the implementation of the Digital Services Act, the European Digital Media Observatory, the Aspen Institute, and many other organizations. Oh, and he is a contributor to Tech Policy Press.
What to expect?
You’ll receive weekly newsletters with quick thoughts on current events related to the science around technology and technology policy, links to interesting stories I’ve come across, relevant events, and polls. Several times per month you will also receive in-depth analysis, research, and thought pieces.
I am also interested in having semi-regular Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessions for my subscribers, and will experiment with other possibilities that intrigue me.
Oh, and jokes. Possibly even bad ones. Consider this your content warning.
With that said, subscribe and you’ll never miss any newsletters, analyses, or jokes. Especially the jokes.
The time it takes to do this work is not trivial, so if you find this content useful, please consider signing up for a paid subscription. For the cost of one craft beer a month, you can support my independent journalism, research, and help me pay my rent and feed my beloved 15-year old lab-whippet fur-baby, Mojo.
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Join the community
Be part of a community of people who care more about understanding and basing important decisions and efforts on data instead of dogma. The issues we wrestle with and try to understand here are complicated, and path forward is often unclear. Join the community so that we can help each other think better and find the path to solving some of the biggest problems stemming from the relationship between people and the technology they use.
