“The Brain” manipulated by Facebook
Do you know how Justin Bieber was dug up? He was discovered on YouTube when he was just 12 years old. If you think social media has only changed social method, you’re wrong. In addition to finding stars, it can help us find jobs and, in some cases, rewrite our current political landscape. I think the negative impact of social media has become a lever to control our thinking.
More than 50 percent of people get their breaking news through social media. A photo of Obama winning a second term garnered more than four million “likes” on Facebook, the most in history. Trump’s use of Twitter makes the impact of social media on the political zone even more intriguing. Social media has further energized political and organizational consciousness, sometimes even rewriting the current political landscape.
For political elections in the United States, voters in the 1960s and 1970s mostly learned about and followed the political candidates they were interested in on their television screens at home. At that time, political candidates had to rely on traditional media, such as television, to create their own image and thus gain voters’ approval and support. Today, political campaigns in the United States have undergone a major shift. While candidates still compete for television appearances and headlines, one secret weapon is often used to get a hold of what voters are thinking — Big Data. So how powerful is big data in political elections?
“We can use the data to analyze the personality and psychological activity of every adult in the United States.” Alexander Nix, the former chief executive of the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, made the comment two weeks before the 2016 U.S. election.
They can collect data from social networking sites like Facebook users’ personal information and the individual big data analysis, thus obtain the user’s psychological characteristic. Through this way they can not only use data to make candidates campaign strategy, also can push these political campaign ads for special political Facebook users, even fabricated of political news. Meanwhile, Facebook is facing mounting pressure from Congress. With several members of Congress personally writing to CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify about why Facebook allowed third-party companies to illegally collect personal data and violate users’ privacy under the guise of research. Finally, Zuckerberg broke his silence, admitted his mistake and offered to fix it.
This is not the first time that has happened (social media control people choices). At the beginning, we just thought of social media as a platform to share our lives and connect with family and friends. After such a long time of evolution, social media has become a platform for watching news, looking for fashion, buying goods and chasing stars, which has increased a lot of interest, diversity and functionality. It is like a rough robot gradually with the artificial skin and human emotions, so the next step, will we be killed by this “bionic robot”？
When will we free ourselves from Facebook’s grip? Does it start by ditching the phone, or by facing up to the truth of the news and where news comes from? Social media seems to have taken root in people’s lives and become an indispensable part of people’s lives. Would adding more privacy rules, laws and reducing grey areas serve as a way to break Facebook’s desire to “dominate”?
