Physics explains why there is no information on social media

By Tiernan Ray | June 22, 2021 -- 13:03 GMT (06:03 PDT) | Topic: Artificial Intelligence

Anyone who has watched a dozen videos on TikTok with the same dance moves, or read innumerable tweets with the same canned expressions knows that there's very little information on social media. 

That is not an accident -- it is by design. Social media apps are communications channels, but communications of a particular kind. They are designed to transmit an aggregate signal of all the things people are saying, and in so doing, boost advertising revenue. To do so, social media seeks to minimize what is known as entropy, which is basically equivalent to minimizing information. 

Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann was the first to interpret entropy in statistical terms. Over time, the probability of the many different possible energy states of particles increases, making it harder and harder to predict the state of matter.  

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