Is this a shared responsiblity?
Artificial intelligence has become an umbrella term for applications that perform complex tasks that required human input in the past such as communicating with customers online or monitoring stock and stock movement. The term is often used interchangeably with its sub-domains, which include machine learning and deep learning.
In recent years, the world is witnessing a type of social communication between people in a virtual electronic space called social networks, which shortened distances between peoples, abolished borders and melted cultures. These networks multiplied rapidly and accounted for a wide audience of recipients. Indeed, political and natural events in the world had a prominent role in introducing these networks, and in return, the credit for these networks was to deliver quick news, text messages and video clips about these events, which helped in the fame and spread of these networks, the most important of which are: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, you name it.
Amidst the widespread influence of social media today, there is still an effort made by scientists and researchers to employ artificial intelligence mechanisms and applications to address many of the drawbacks of these platforms, such as fake news and rumors, and work to employ such smart systems to benefit from the identification of users’ tendencies, orientations and preferences.
Artificial intelligence has a superior ability to analyze data and use scientific methods to extract value from these datas. Therefore, institutions and companies rely on it and employ it in order to obtain large investments with a rewarding return, as artificial intelligence combines its ability to analyze data collected from multiple sources of scientific knowledge with the skills drawn from other areas such as statistics and computer science.
Although social media relies relatively on short phrases, pictures and symbols, it is considered a rich source of information. Thus, all categories of society members resort to it in search of information, fun or work. And with the spread of social networking sites, an increasing need emerged to develop smart methods to monitor them. Henceforth, applications of artificial intelligence appeared as human attempts to control everything in the space of these programs, with the aim of protection, surveillance and security. This raised the curiosity of researchers to know the extent of the effect of artificial intelligence applications in monitoring social media.
And because this topic bifurcates and covers many areas, it has been addressed through three axis:
First axis: the role of artificial intelligence applications in detecting fake news and rumors
Second axis: the role of artificial intelligence applications in marketing and consumer preferences
Third axis: the role of artificial intelligence applications in security and protection of social networking sites
Final Thoughts
Artificial intelligence applications have been involved in most aspects of life, which made robots and machine learning systems a feature of the new era. Thus, they will be relied upon and used in several broad fields, the field needs to increase research and develop new types of algorithms and applying them in practice to produce the best results, the most accurate and similar to human intelligence and its decisions.
Conducting intensive future studies aimed at making use of artificial intelligence applications to control the mechanism of ads through social media, display advertising content and attract customers without disturbing them.
It is required from companies to adopt machine learning systems in the marketing of their products and to follow up on users’ tendencies and interests to develop their logistics services.
Opening the door to integrating artificial intelligence applications with cybersecurity experts to develop social media protection systems in particular and the Internet in general, to address rumours, fake news, spyware and unethical programs to reach the safe space stage.
It is very early to predict if most of these technology companies would adopt the best practices pertaining to Artificial Intelligence in this space and keeping their users at the top of the list. The answer also lies on the users as how far we can go to safeguard ourselves and own this as a shared responsibility?
Reference: Al-Derbi, Tahani, Samar Al-Sulami, and Manal Daa’fas. “The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Monitoring Social Media.” American Academic & Scholarly Research Journal 11.11 (2021).
