Social media can do as much harm as good
Unprecedented control of information troubling
Eight years ago, on the night of a presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, CNN gave a few dozen undecided voters a little box with a dial on it. The voters watched the debate and reacted immediately to what the candidates were saying. If they heard something they liked, they turned the knob one way; if not, they dialed in the opposite direction. The data from the voters was aggregated, and the net result was instantly displayed on a continuous coloured line at the bottom of the screen.
This live response mechanism was billed as futuristic and revolutionary. Today, of course, it seems incredibly quaint. When Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump debated earlier this week, anyone watching could share their own reactions or see those of millions of others instantly on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms.
For something that was barely causing a ripple when Obama was sworn in as president, social media wields extraordinary power as he prepares to leave office. According to one study, almost two-thirds of Americans now get their news from Twitter or Facebook. That’s despite the fact that neither is actually a news organization.
Social media has unleashed the cleverness and creativity of millions of people in a world that was previously the domain of only a privileged few. But there are reasons to be concerned about the impact of social media and the judgment of its administrators. Twitter and Facebook have contributed to a potentially harmful trend of favouring the immediate over the important, the quick, pithy comment over the carefully considered and well-supported analysis.
And if social media platforms are replacing conventional ones as a source of news, there’s a risk that long-established standards will disappear. Twitter and Facebook are both grappling with decisions that traditional media organizations have been trying to master for years, particularly around who gets to talk, what they are allowed to say and who gets to decide both.
In newspapers, letters to the editor have to be signed and the writer’s identity verified. But anyone can set up a social media account and comment freely. Some people view this as an example of freedom of speech, particularly for those who fear political oppression. But it also means any yahoo can send messages of hate with very little accountability. Technology has empowered both the best and the worst in us.
Particularly concerning is the expanding authority of the proprietors of social media platforms. They’re mostly entrepreneurs, engineers and programmers, rather than journalists and ethicists, but they have unprecedented editorial control over what the world reads and views. The risks are already evident. Only days after replacing human editors with an algorithm, Facebook widely distributed an erroneous story about a FOX News host.
And this week, Twitter is considering a request from the Turkish government to block the comments of a deported journalist who has become a reliable source of information about the persecution of reporters and dissidents in his home country. The account remains active for now, but even to consider complying with such a demand places Twitter on the side of an odious regime instead of freedom of speech.
In the first six months of 2016, Twitter had received roughly 2,500 requests from the Turkish government to remove content. In about a quarter of the cases, the company complied, often when it wasn’t required to do so by law. Was that because the material was genuinely inappropriate or because Twitter feared that if it didn’t do as the authorities wished, it would be banned from the country?
An environment in which almost everyone has the opportunity to comment freely and instantly is, even with all of its pitfalls, highly democratic.
But if the decisions about who and what is censored remain in the hands of a small number of people, whose motives are not always clearly on the side of the public good, and who refuse to take a principled stand against oppression, then social media has the potential to do as much harm as good.