Blog #9 — Section 230 & Data Privacy
Blog #9 — Section 230 & Data Privacy 3/29/24
I believe social media platforms should be responsible for regulating content. However, I don’t think the platform itself needs to be penalized and fined for users not meeting their community guidelines. Social media has guidelines, which are set rules and regulations for what can be posted on their site. There are some gray areas I believe which go back and forth between free speech and following these said guidelines. Just like you’re able to express your ideas vocally, the idea is you should be able to post something online that you believe in. What disrupts this is social media platforms agree that there are certain things you should post on the internet and some things that violate guidelines and should be taken down. I’ve noticed different platforms can be a lot more lenient with this information like X and Reddit, where platforms like Instagram and Facebook aren’t. I personally don’t like the role it plays in elections because it makes something so important in our county humorous and unprofessional. The role of Facebook and Twitter in elections has changed so much and especially in 2016 it caused uproars from both parties as fights and debates happened on the internet between politicians. I do believe our future revolves around the internet, but interactions like those should have consequences and social media platforms should be able to regulate hateful or unprofessional acts coming from candidates.
The other side of this coin though is consumers are using the platform how it’s intended, and it just happens to be the people running for political positions. It all comes back to the idea that the social media company is an organization that you can choose to use or not. This transitions into my idea that social media platforms should have the right to use the data of their users. While I believe this might be a crazy take, I think that anything you post on social media using a certain platform should be able to be shared with people, because it’s the reason you’re using social media in the first place. I do understand concerns like you don’t want family photos or private messages to be shared. However, there are some areas like following accounts and liking content that will lead to personalized ads. These are the types of things that you signed up for when creating an account.
Similar to Section 230, it would be interesting to see if any regulations are passed in the future about what type of information can be sold to other companies. I think having set guidelines of what can be shared and having the option to share data would make the whole situation a lot more digestible for users on the internet. However, I have noticed with the newer generations, this isn’t as big of a concern on whether their data is shared or not. A classmate commented on our previous discussion that he doesn’t care if ads are more focused on him and actually prefers it. While I do agree there should be some regulation of social media platforms as it relates to user privacy and data, I don’t think it needs to be entirely shut down and should require more explanation and choice by the user of what gets shared.
