Reasons why today’s social media won’t last long
Today, social networks store enormous amounts of our data: from text, to photos, to videos, to geotags. Their scale, with billions of users worldwide, has enabled social media companies to put data at the core of their business models. In fact, hundreds of petabytes of personal data are being collected while we scroll through our Twitter feeds and share posts on Facebook.
This leverage allows social media companies to not only manipulate our attention to show us more ads but also influence our perception of the real world by experimenting with our psycho-emotional states. For example, Facebook has been caught performing such research and selling reports to third parties. As a matter of fact, over 700,000 users were involved in this news feed experiment carried out against any ethical norms. Similar shady activities has already lead to serious real-world consequences:
- 64% of U.S. Facebook users said fabricated news stories caused a great deal of confusion about the 2016 presidential election.
- 57,000 tweets and 4,900 emails were sent to support an anti-sexism campaign led by Soraya Chemaly. The campaign was aimed at getting Facebook to delete content that contained domestic and sexual abuse. As a result, the company revised its Hate Speech Policy, and 15 large companies, including Nissan UK, House of Burlesque and Nationwide UK, deleted their ads from the network.
In particular, Facebook’s new facial recognition tech — which collects and stores users’ biometric data without prior notice or consent — has been ruled illegal. And now, complying with the new data protection rules, the company has still decided to bring it back in Europe, using GDPR to gain competitive benefits and continuing to bet on the same “collect it all” strategy.
Even if we assume social networks are not trying to manipulate us and users see real, accurate news and information, our data is still at risk. According to the InfoWatch Analytics Center, confidential data leaks worldwide quadrupled in 2017. Here are even more examples:
- 50 million Facebook profiles containing personal data ended up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica, which illegally used the data to target users with politically oriented ads.
- For $5, anyone can buy a database containing 1 million user accounts, including full names, email addresses, and more.
Even worse, Facebook’s user base comprises 6.4 million adults between the ages of 55 and 65 years old, many of whom aren’t so tech-savvy. Hacks and data leaks can turn their lives upside down, and they can become victims of cyberbullying. All this can have irreversible consequences, such as depression or suicide, which has already affected many young people.
Today, social media is used to manipulate our minds and emotions. Those running the networks treat our personal data as currency and forget that people are the ones making the content social networks use to garner attention.
However, the discussions that followed the hacks, leaks, breaches and fake news feed frenzy have mostly led nowhere concrete. Today, these issues require more than just policies and new anti-fake-news campaigns. In fact, we need a new social networking paradigm with fundamentally different interaction mechanisms based on transparent and secure technology. We should start building next-generation services based on fairness and social principles to eventually destroy the monopoly created by today’s overcentralized social media and regain control of our online data.
