“Rotten brains as Meta”: says article by Arthur Bezerra

 

Image: Muffin Land

 

The president of the International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE), Arthur Bezerra, published the article “Rotten Brains as Meta”, on the Portal A Terra é Redonda, alluding to the changes announced by Mark Zuckerberg’s conglomerate, which includes Facebook, Instagram and Threads. In the text, the scientist, who is a senior researcher at the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (Ibict), criticizes the loss of analytical capacity in society, due to excessive exposure to irrelevant and fallacious content in the digital environment.

In his reflection, Bezerra also takes as a reference the expression of the year 2024, according to the traditional choice of Oxford University Press: “Brain rot”, which summarizes the deterioration of the individual’s mental or intellectual state. According to the researcher, the term, which saw a 230% increase in searches between 2023 and 2024, reflects a real, and increasingly urgent, concern about the impacts of prolonged use of digital technologies.

“For the billions of individuals who use Zuckerberg’s social networks, the expected consequence is an increase in brain rot”, warns Arthur Bezerra.

Furthermore, as the researcher highlights, this phenomenon develops within a socioeconomic system based on profitability around the production and exploitation of user data, typical of the market platformization model.

“As is already known, in practically all business models structured around digital platforms, the data produced by internet users today represents an indispensable input, be it geolocation data (fundamental for transport platforms, such as Uber, or deliveries, such as iFood), tastes and preferences (such as those used by Amazon, Youtube and Netflix to suggest goods and recommend audiovisual content), or all of this together and mixed with data on likes, comments and shares, as often occurs on social networks such as Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok. The longer a user is interacting on a platform, the more personal data they will produce”, he highlights.

 

To check out the article published by Arthur Bezerra in A Terra é Redonda, in full, click here.

 

*Originally published in Portuguese on the Perfil-i research group website

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