Washing Away The Wild Wild West
One of the largest controversial issues regarding social media is the collection and usage of data. Facebook is known for this issue, where the company has been caught numerous times collecting users information and selling it for multiple reasons. The most popular reason is advertising, where now social media platforms can decide what a particular user likes and push forward specified ads onto their feed for them to see and click.
Is data collection a bad thing? Not if it’s known, even in the fine print. A lot of these platforms are now making users aware that data is being collected on them even if it means burying it in the terms and services. It’s up to the user to be knowledgeable enough to know that what they post, like, retweet, pin, share, etc, etc, etc, can be tracked and recorded for the company’s benefit. It’s the price a user must pay for the hours upon hours of free entertainment provided by these free platforms.
Facebook itself is a power house with multiple apps within itself to keep users entertained for free. Free games, free videos, free storage center for photos, free dating, free phone calls, video chats, and messaging. As long as a user has internet connection or a cellphone data plan, all that stuff is completely free.
Collection of data runs into problems when companies are the ones tricked by a lack of information. Let’s talk about Cambridge Analytica.
To make a complicated story of big business and political agendas short: Cambridge Analytica shook hands with Facebook agreeing upon the collection of over 80 million profiles for “academic reasons”.
This was a lie. Sort of. That’s another story.
Cambridge Analytica “worked” for the Trump Campaign in 2016 (because someone was a big donor), so all that data collected, through a silly quiz, was immediately put into use for the campaign.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg received a lot of backlash over it because people believe that it was Zuckerberg’s responsibility to protect the data is platform was generating.
Is it though?
Should a platform be responsible for what millions of users do? In Facebook’s case, they agreed to let Cambridge Analytica collect data through the personality quiz created for collection purposes, but no one said that those users HAD to take the quiz or HAD to have an account where they were continuously active enough to have data collected on them. This was a case where perhaps Facebook should have been more open about data collection, and education on how this all works should be more accessible.
If online safety is already a part of a school’s curriculum, why not add in a “the internet is collecting your data” section. The collection of data only looks wrong because of how sneaky it looks, but if the concept was more main stream and discussed as it should be, things like the Cambridge Analytica scandal wouldn’t happen.
We shouldn’t be pointing the finger at our platform’s companies when things happen on said platform that is completely a users fault either. When we begin censoring our users, we lose the qualities that make social media the medium that it is.
Social Media is a wild west of freedom of speech. It’s what makes social media a balance between super productive and super not productive. Sure, the hate comments are there, but more importantly the comments that spark ideas and conversation are also there. If platforms begin censoring what a user can post, social media would fall into its decline along with newspapers and television.
Think of it this way: television is a big money making scheme where big business men sit down and pick out precisely what is going to be shown and at what time. Those programs will be carefully written to cater what those big business men consider “good for society”, but remain addicting enough that the user keeps watching so commercials can be seen. Television isn’t for the content created, it’s for the ads. Don’t forget that those ads are carefully crafted to have a balance of humor and rhetoric to make you buy products.
Younger generations see through this, and that’s why a lot of young adults don’t even have a cable subscription.
We could talk about newspapers too — those are all carefully crafted and edited as well.
Social media, however, is a free space for people to say whatever the hell they want. Here we see news stories breaking and being covered by every day citizens instead of politically affiliated reporters. We have creative minds molding messages about things other mediums refuse to talk about such as mental health.
When you say that platforms should be keeping an eye out on what users post, and being able to block messages you might not want to see, you are blocking out all the opportunities of every other possible message as well.
Please do not wash away the only wild west we have left. The authentic medium WE, the user, have power over is something to keep sacred.
