It isn’t easy but keeping social media hordes at bay can be done if you control what you share
WHEN Channel 4 aired its now infamous ‘Dispatches’ documentary, ‘Inside Facebook: Secrets Of The Social Network’, last week, the reaction to the behemoth’s rather lax attitude towards problematic content was one of shock and surprise.
That the footage which was allowed to stay up was shocking is not in doubt. But should any of us have been surprised?
Ministers were quick to say the time had come to bring in proper forms of regulation. Charities were equally and correctly incensed by the footage of a child being beaten, for example, and they too have been calling for tougher controls on what can be uploaded.
Few politicians have ever encountered a phenomenon they didn’t try to regulate, particularly when it’s to do with the media, and Facebook is more than a mere phenomenon, it is a crucial and staple part of many people’s lives.
The success of the social networking site is such that Facebook’s owner Mark Zuckerberg is now one of the world’s richest men. He is, more pertinently, now one of the most influential, no matter how much he may try to rely on his ‘aw gee shucks’, phoneybaloney faux innocence.
It’s been a long time since anyone bought Zuckerberg’s shtick that he is just a guy in a hoodie who got lucky and while the footage displayed in Thursday night’s show was undeniably stomach churning, the most relevant comment came from one moderator who simply said that “it’s all about making money”.
As a guiding principle, when it comes to dealing with large and controversial companies, the philosophy of follow-the-money remains true no matter what they are selling and the irony with Facebook is that it is selling its own customers’ data.
But when it comes to honestly looking at the practices of companies like Facebook, Twitter and other micro-blogging sites which are supposedly free, people need to remember that just because you don’t fork out a monthly subscription fee, that doesn’t mean you get to use the service for nothing.
Someone always pays, and it’s usually the average punter.
But the debate that has been bubbling away for the last few years and reached boiling point last week also reminds us just how willing we are to splurge our private details and opinions all over the infinitely broad canvas of cyberspace.
If Facebook et al are the new Wild West of the modern world, most of its users are naïve prospectors who don’t seem to realise there are bandits around every corner.
But as much as Irish politicians and their counterparts in the UK and the States would like to throw a lasso around Facebook and bring it under some sort of control, they seem incapable of understanding these companies have transcended national borders as traditional multinationals would understand them.
Unless we’re happy to take a leaf out of China or Turkey’s book, and start blocking all access to websites the powers-that-be don’t like, then there’s actually not much we can – or even should – do. Obnoxious content can be upsetting and destructive,
but not as damaging governments taking it upon themselves to tell their citizens what they are allowed to watch.
It also shows further naïvety on the part of the likes of Leo Varadkar and Denis Naughten. After all, while they may have been shocked by the details of the recent TV programme, Facebook is a veritable safe haven for consumers when compared to the many websites dedicated to showing execution videos, real-life Mexican drug-gang torture porn and all sorts of other genuinely horrifying insights into the darkest regions of the human psyche.
No proof of ID is needed for those particularly repellent recesses of the internet; recesses which come up on a quick Google search and only require you to click the button solemnly promising that you are over 18.
But there is another, far more profound argument the politicians like to avoid – the personal responsibility of the consumer.
To many observers, the fact so many people now ‘curate’ their own news feed, for instance, is a cause of genuine concern.
You don’t have to buy the refrain that the Russians stole the election for Trump to recognise that creating a generation of people who only ever see the news they want to see is hardly conducive to a well-informed, discerning populace.
While we may all hold wildly different opinions on a range of matters (as is only right and proper), we all have an obligation to ourselves to at least try to be as widely informed as possible. That’s simply not going to happen when you only expose yourself to those with whom you agree.
That’s one of the reasons why politics has become so viciously polarised – it has become what American writer Greg Gutfeld calls ‘team sport politics’, where neither side is prepared to even pretend to listen to what the other has to say.
As both sides – for example the alt-right and the hard left – glower at each other, they have denied themselves the opportunity to see they actually have far more in common than either side would like to admit, chief among them a vicious contempt for anyone who doesn’t share the totality of their respective views. Nowadays it’s always a battle between good and evil, where each side’s commentators think they are the white knights and their opponents are filled with wickedness.
Apart from anything else, this approach is nonsensically reductive and has already caused a profound ideological schism in Western societies which sees people looking for confirmation of their own biases rather then fresh ideas and information.
It’s often said we’re living in the Information Age. But it’s probably more accurate to call it the Anxiety Age – people have become slaves to their own Androids and tablets and have elevated something that should have been fun but minor into something now scary and major.
That’s why it is important to remind people, especially young people who can’t remember or don’t know a time before social media, that they control their own Facebook/Twitter/YouTube experience, not the other way around.
But as ever, the people are several steps ahead of the politicians.
FOR all the talk of Facebook being a ubiquitous, malign force, it should be remembered the company lost a staggering 2.8 million young users last year and a similar number the year before that.
In much the same way the once powerful My Space and Bebo went the way of the dodo, Facebook is already seen as old hat by teens and millennials who prefer Instagram and Snapchat.
So, we can wait for the current panic over Facebook to pass, and attention will then move on to those hipper platforms.
The arguments will remain the same but so will the advice – social media is a good thing, but too much of a good thing can have devastating effects in the current air of anxiety.
Just remember you’re in charge of your social media experiences and your chosen platform is there to work for you, rather than you working for it.
Easier said than done, perhaps, but who said everything had to be easy?