MDC Social Media Good or Bad for Democracy Case Study
The philosopher Martin Heidegger spoke of the relentless drive of technology as the world and its objects become victim to humanity’s calculations and designs. But technology’s indeterminacy implies an uncertain future since we cannot predict where this drive will take us. A recent evolution of information technology has been social networking. Social networking fuses together the multimedia world described by Marshal McLuhan with virtual reality, and it displaces the real world with an artificial one. The person now dwells more extensively in an environment of texting, selfies, chats, Instagram photos, newsfeeds, and blogs. There was some apprehensiveness about the power of social media well before the immense popularity of Facebook and Twitter became a reality. But few could have foreseen that social media would also become a means
for spreading misinformation and magnifying political partisanship.
Techno optimists once argued that social media had the potential to become a great stimulus for democracy because it amplified the powers of free speech. When Facebook and similar platforms first appeared, many sincerely hoped that they would give voice to the marginalized in society. People with different and unconventional viewpoints could locate each other and mobilize to advance their interests. But while these results have been realized to some extent, these sites have also become purveyors of “fake news” along with vast amounts of disinformation. The term “fake news” has been popularized by President Donald Trump, but it was coined by Buzz Feed’s Craig Silverman. For some, the proliferation of all this “fake news” and other forms of online abuse has wiped away the great promise of the internet as a force for semiotic democracy.
During the 2016 presidential election there was considerable disinformation on the web, along with heavy manipulation of information about the two presidential candidates, Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump. This abuse wasn’t supposed to happen on this democratizing technology, at least not on this scale. But decentralized networks with no controls can become powerful tools in the hands of extremists and opportunists. News sites appeared printing sensational stories that were neither vetted nor verified. For these sites, which sought eyeballs to attract ads and generate revenues, there was little incentive to avoid misinformation and the diffusion of propaganda.
Consider the “fake news” entrepreneurs in Macedonia who created a number of pro-Trump websites. They adroitly imitated actual news sites and disseminated very partisan news stories that attracted Trump supporters. Their website domain names included worldpoliticus.com and trumpvision365.com. The sites published pro-Trump stories aimed at his supporters in the United States. These young Macedonians had no interest in advancing the candidacy of Mr. Trump. Rather, their sole interest was in attracting readers, since the volume of readers on their websites translated into greater advertising dollars. They also recognized that the best way to generate online traffic was to get their stories about the Trump campaign to spread on Facebook. Most of the websites had Facebook pages with hundreds of thousands of followers. The more sensational the content, the more attention the story got among Facebook followers. And as Facebook engagements increased, so did their readers who were attracted by their outlandish propaganda stories. For example, within a week a spurious story from Conservativestate .com, “Hillary Clinton in 2013: I Would Like to See People Like Donald Trump Run for Office; They’re Honest and Can’t Be Bought,” generated 480,000 reactions, comments, and likes on Facebook. Virtually all of the stories on these websites made false and misleading claims.
The spread of propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation has become an epidemic in cyberspace and threatens to strike at the heart of the democratic process. Disinformation is the deliberate communication of false or misleading information, while misinformation is the communication of information without an intent to deceive. Often those who disseminate misinformation have evidence that is indirect or obscure. Democracies depend heavily on accurate and objective information so voters can make informed choices. Fake news misleads voters and contributes to the further polarization of political parties. According to one political strategist, fake news disseminated on social media is “the biggest political problem facing leaders around the world.” This hyperbolic statement reflects the inability of governments to deal with fake news narratives except through draconian measures that are anathema to democracy.
But fake news is not the only problem that bedevils social media. As the leading social media platform, Facebook found itself at the center of multiple controversies that involved the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In March 2018, the British newspaper, the Observer, along with the New York Times first revealed that a researcher had gained access to the personal data of Facebook users for Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm hired by the Trump campaign. The researcher, Alexander Kogan, created a Facebook app and invited Facebook users to take a survey and download the app that harvested their Facebook data along with the data of their Facebook friends. That data included names, birth dates, and location data as well as lists of every Facebook page they ever liked. And these data were downloaded without their knowledge or consent and added to a massive database being assembled for Cambridge Analytica. This political data firm has particular expertise in developing persuasive ads using “psychographic” techniques to manipulate voter preferences. By examining behavioral data such as what people “liked,” it was possible to map out personality traits that could become the basis for targeted ads. The personal data of 87 million users had been mined in this way, and Facebook was aware of this activity since December 2015. However, it said nothing to its users or to U.S. regulators until the media published this story. Facebook has claimed that Cambridge Analytica collected these data under false pretenses. The scandal led to many questions about how Facebook monitors the apps deployed to collect its user information and whether data should ever be made available for psychological profiling for political purposes.
Facebook has also been an unwitting catalyst for violence in vulnerable parts of the world. Facebook entered Myanmar, a country unfamiliar with the digital world, and was unprepared to deal with its deep political and social divisions. Facebook seemed unaware of how its platform could be manipulated and abused by extremists who could easily sway a naïve population. In this country, Facebook was the internet, since most users only had mobile phones with Facebook already installed. Buddhist extremists wasted no time in using social media to spread disinformation in order to inflame ethnic tensions against the Muslim Rohingya minority. One of the country’s leading Buddhist monks ignited a deadly riot when he disseminated a fake news story of a rape and warned of a “Jihad against us.” According to one NGO, Facebook’s platform was used for a “campaign of hate speech that actively dehumanize[d] Muslims.” By March 2017 a million Muslims had fled Myanmar into Bangladesh. Facebook monitors missed many posts full of disinformation that helped to spark this ethnic cleansing. Moreover, when the tragedy intensified, Facebook was quite slow to react and remove hateful content, despite
repeated warnings from multiple sources. It also did little to prevent fake accounts from being created. Zuckerberg himself recognized the company’s tardiness, as the people of Myanmar wondered why a company with Facebook’s resources could not have reacted more expediently.
In his defense to this series of crises, Zuckerberg has insisted that fakes news is much less common than people imagine. He attributes the company’s mistakes and missteps to an excessive optimism and a lack of awareness of how some Facebook customers misuse their service. But some analysts are quick to point out that while this explanation has some merit, it ignores the company’s fixation on rapid growth and an unwillingness to heed warnings from outsiders.
The company has made some concessions. For many years Facebook did not disclose the sources of funding for political ads. But now users can find out on Facebook who paid for a political ad and whom the ad targeted. The company is also considering ways to “impose friction” to impede the spread of disinformation and misinformation. (Perhaps pop-ups with warnings such as “Do you really want to share this item?”). However, it is exceedingly difficult to control election propaganda or slow down the spread of disinformation, short of draconian censorship measures. With 2.7 billion people using Facebook’s services, monitoring content is the most difficult challenge facing the company. Yet fake news is a threat to liberal democracy, and Facebook must find a way to deal with users who share these false or barely credible news posts. On the other hand, it is perilous to have a small group of social media companies determine what kinds of political speech people will see. Hence the social media world faces a paradox: a greater emphasis on truthful news and communications will lead to limits on free speech, while too much speech opens the door for flows of disinformation and reckless propaganda.
How can social media strike the right balance between these two competing objectives?
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