Social media misuse needs everyone on guard

THE modern world is ever more reliant on what is often called information and communication technology, ICT, and so much that is good and convenient comes from such technology that no one wants to retreat back into the sort of world we lived in as recently as 30 years ago.

But as with all such technology it can be used for good or misused for evil. However, wonderful the technology it is still used by human beings, and they have not changed. So President Mnangagwa’s warnings on Friday at the Zimbabwe Military Academy about the problems, from the misuse of social media right up to full-scale cyber terrorism, with a great deal in between, are something that should be considered.

Social media platforms are not just fun, they provide many useful and often vital services. We saw this recently with just one platform, Facebook, when Australia was looking at changing its law to compel social media platforms to pay a fee for using copyrighted material, a not unreasonable legal provision.

Facebook upped the stakes by closing down almost all its platform in Australia, flexing its muscles in a big way and showing its own power. That shutdown did not just cut back the fund bits of social interaction, it also brought down a range of near-essential services such as weather warnings and hammered a wide-range of charitable organisations.

A lot of the dispute was resolved in talks between the Australian government and Facebook, with the platform making it clear that it could negotiate with a major sovereign state as an equal or superior, a rather blatant exhibition of just how powerful such global platforms have become.

Even in the US, where that platform’s headquarters are based, it came in for a lot of criticism from all sides of the political spectrum over its decision to bar the outgoing US President Donald Trump following an assault on the US Capitol by some of his more extreme supporters, again with that assault live on social media platforms.

And there was that horrendous example of a mass murderer in New Zealand streaming his killing spree in a mosque live on Facebook.

So even when there are attempts by platform owners to do some internal policing, these are not always successful.

And the vast bulk of those who use the platforms negatively, to spread fake news they have created, or fake news they have picked up, or the conspiracy theories they believe in do not get picked up.

So even at this lowest level, the fake news and conspiracy theory level, the only way of dealing with them is to upgrade educational systems and teach people to be discriminating, to be able to assess the worth of what they read or hear and make a judgment.

In the pre- ICT days, people were helped. Print journalism and broadcast journalism at its best sees rumours and reports go through vetting procedures to establish truth.

In most countries there are legal penalties for not doing this; there might be no laws saying what is permitted, but the ordinary civil laws of defamation, protection of the vulnerable and damages for reckless behaviour mean that irresponsible journalism ends up with large damages payments.

In any case such publishing has to have an identifiable originator, a newspaper, magazine, book author, radio station or television station. This makes it easy for people to assess the worth of what they read or hear and explains why most reputable publishers and broadcasters go to such extraordinary lengths to protect their brand and their name. Those seen as agents of propaganda or misinformation are at least mentally labelled as such.

For some odd reason the same discrimination is often not applied on what comes through social media platforms. “Social media says . . .” is often seen. Social media, of course, says nothing. Somewhere a human says something, and in many cases it is an anonymous human. So it is not only impossible to assess the worth of the source, but increasingly weird why such an anonymous source should be trusted.

No doubt in the end most people will be able and willing to make reasonably correct assessments. Most communities managed this in the earlier days of print when some equally fake and harmful pamphlets were circulated and eventually such activity became nearly useless because people were not stupid.

Cyber-terrorism is another quite different threat. This involves anything from hacking into systems for espionage, both national and corporate, to steal information, through the attempts to change information on databases to attempts to disrupt systems.

So we have bank account and credit card details being stolen. We have identity theft to make crimes easier. And there are many more ingenious efforts by criminals and terrorists in this regard since human ingenuity is almost limitless.

Those responsible for systems security have built in ever more safeguards, ever better security for databases, for example, that not just block attacks, but can identify attacks in their early stages and block them then. We are now quite used to those warnings from our banks not to give out details to on-line requests for password information and not to share our passwords.

While any password can eventually be broken there are also those extra simple safeguards that allow just three attempts to enter a password, which take into account people with clumsy fingers or who have used the old or wrong password but prevent a determined attack to crack a password.

But again fairly obviously the security software writers need to be one step ahead of the criminal writers.

We have overcome this often in the past by recognising that all new technology is morally neutral. So when firearms became efficient and cheap, most countries took some care to figure out ways that allowed the honest who needed them to buy them but tried to keep them out of criminal hands.

As motor vehicles became common we all had to move from that single page of simple rules for horses and bicycles to the fairly thick books of road regulations that apply to lots of powerful and fast road users, but no one has figured out how to stop a gang of robbers using a car as a getaway vehicle, only how to track it down afterwards.

We are still in the early days of universal and cheap information and communication technologies, and no doubt we will be able to figure out how to maximise the good and minimise the evil, but as the President noted, this requires continual education not just of responsible authorities, but of everyone.