Social Media: A draining addiction we can’t seem to shake, or worse?
When I think about my own relationship with social media, it reminds me of a love/hate, frenemy type of relationship. It can be funny, interesting, informative, and can connect us to others. These are great and all, but at what price must we pay to enjoy the upsides of social media? Hint: it’s not a bargain…
After reading Kara Swisher’s article from the New York Times, it got me thinking about the whole issue of social media, Facebook in particular. They were the first social media platform to really change our world forever — many believe for the worse, myself included. Swisher discusses the platform and it’s anti-competitive culture. Over the last 10 years, any threatening new social media platform to launch is either purchased by Facebook (Instagram, WhatsApp) or FB copies their exact new features of said platform (i.e. Facebook stories, copied from Snapchat). The US government is technically supposed to be looking out for us in regard to such anti-competitive behavior, but have been lenient on this rule when it comes to large tech companies. Clearly some moves have been made in addressing such behavior, due to the recent filings against Facebook (finally!) However, the way I see it, the damage is done…
Specifically, social media has given a voice to everyone — including those who greatly misuse it. This can and has been very dangerous politically, as it has paved the way for aggressive propaganda to be spread. Most recently, anti COVID-19 vaccination accounts have spread like wildfire on many platforms, especially on the major players - Facebook and Twitter. According to this vaccine-related article by Modern Healthcare, Twitter announced that it will begin to remove and falsehoods or misinformation about the vaccines, just as they did in early 2020 regarding general COVID misinformation. However, “since April 2020 it has removed a grand total of 8,400 tweets spreading COVID-related misinformation — a tiny fraction of the avalanche of pandemic-related falsehoods tweeted out daily by popular users with millions of followers, critics say.” Twitter, do better please…
Clearly, there’s a very serious issue going on with information being shared on these platforms. According to the chart below, provided by Statista, in 2019 over 50% of respondents to a study confessed to sharing fake news on social media — with 10% of those knowingly shared the false info. Pretty scary stuff here I’d say. ..
Furthermore, what makes social media even more dangerous, is the fact that accounts and political parties can hyper-target their exact audience, driven by self-reinforcing algorithms. This has lead to serious disruption and considerable polarization in Western societies. According to “The Hype Machine,” by Sinan Aral from MIT’s Sloane, he suggests that the real manipulation lies in the ultra-targeted messages sent to select groups of people, especially in the fact that other people are not even aware that people are receiving these manipulative massages. So, in reality, nobody even sees all of the other persuasion attempts occurring to other people. There is so much unseen manipulation going on that we are not even aware that it exists, and this is absolutely terrifying to say the least.
According to Swisher in her article, she believes that Facebook had this a long time coming, and that it is not too late to take down this superpower tech company. This could be a start to a solution in the negativity of social media. Aral, however, suggests that if we were to begin to disseminate the super players, the next one would quickly take its spot. I don’t quite know where this leaves us, but I do sincerely hope that at least we can begin to mitigate the false information being spread on such platforms, along with such hate and negativity. Personally, I guess I would agree slightly more with Swisher, let’s begin the process of dismantling the power of these platforms, regardless of how long it takes. Just this process alone sends a very powerful message to society, about the use and misuse of these platforms. Perhaps in another decade from now, we will have figured out to live with social media so that it only serves us positively. But until then, we certainly have out work cut out for us.
