Should Social Media be Regulated

Abstract

Social media employ mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms via which individuals and communities share, cocreate, discuss, and modify user-generated content. (Kietzmann et.l 2011) Social media introduce substantial and pervasive changes to communication between organizations, communities, and individuals. The current study observed that the majority of fake news are politically motivated since such messages can be easily be used to manipulate businesses. In addition, the flow of fake news can adversely contribute to malign the image of a company or benefit a company financially in the stock market or where public opinion plays a crucial role. Surveillance has also become a dominant aspect of interactions with governments, corporations, and indeed any and all organizations. It is part of everyday experience, interaction, involvement, and initiative, not least through internet and social media use. Surveillance is rapidly becoming part of a whole way of life, seen in mundane imaginaries and practices such as complacent data donation or social ranking. (David Lyon)

Introduction

Social media refers to a group of internet-based applications which build on the technological and ideological foundations of web 2.0 thus allowing its users to create and exchange content which they have created (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). With the continued growth of social media specific classifications have emerged and these include; content communities such as YouTube, micro blogging sites such as Twitter and social networking sites such as Facebook and WhatsApp. Social media has become the most common form of communication with different classes of people turning to social media for different types of information which include but not limited to product information, political news (Shung Shu).

People use social media for various reasons. At the introduction of social media platforms such as Facebook, they were mainly used to connect people around the world. People could post information, their status which could be viewed and reacted upon by those on their friend list. This later evolved with creation of business pages to connect businesses with their users who were already users of these social sites. This business model worked well for Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Later, the government institutions in an attempt of adapting to technological revolutions adapted social media as a tool to disseminate information about their daily activities to the public. In US, the government made a deliberate decision through a memo that all departments and agencies were to “harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public” (Obama, 2009). Almost all governments in current time have online presence in Social media pages and even blog websites.

With developments in recent past, social media has changed from being exclusively ‘social’ to a complex and dynamic communities where people share information with their friend lists, receive updates of government activities. Social media has also evolved to be a source of News. In US, most people read their news on Facebook. Businesses have also seized opportunities to market their products through social media which is relatively cheaper compared to traditional media. Currently, it is estimated that more than a 4 billion people have access internet.

Despite the achievements of social media in enhancing communication, there are several challenges which it poses. These include; government and employer surveillance, privacy problems, exposure of the population to fake news, exposure of children to misleading and inappropriate content, exposure of consumers to misleading product information. Among these challenges this report focuses on personal data and surveillance capitalism, misinformation and fake news to inform a decision on the need for the regulation of social media. Such weighty matters affect implicitly or directly billions of lives globally either for good or to their disadvantage.

Fake news refers to news that is either totally false or contains misleading elements which may have been deliberately included in its content or context. For instance, there may be a false connection whereby the topic may not match the content, or genuine information may be presented under a false context or a deliberate use of genuine information to frame a situation or person. Even though fake news can be argued to have been in existent from time immemorial in fields such as politics, its prevalence has been heightened and proliferated by the birth of social media. This is due availability of wide array of platforms with many subscribers to generate and spread fake news online where unsuspecting persons receive it as truth. With ease of sharing, such information finally finds their ways into the reach of millions within few hours.

The characteristics of social media that has led to this outcome of fast fake news include the increasing immediate nature of the news cycle. This is where social media pages like twitter are used as official source of breaking news. This means the efforts of journalists are further spread resulting into a possible use of unverified news by the media. The other feature of social media that is favorable for the generation of fake news is the rapid online circulation of misinformation by the use of user generated content. These especially thrives as fake news if not examined.

Surveillance capitalism refers to monetization of data captured by monitoring people’s movements and behaviors online and in the physical world. This term was first introduced in 2014 by John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney. There are different types of capitalism, the most common to the public is Consumer surveillance for targeted marketing. Have you ever searched for an item on the browser and by some miracles if you open Facebook account you find an advert related to the item or information your searched on the browser? The suspicion is, the government urgencies may also be using some information that individuals post online to profile them.

Methods

To address this question, various case studies have been revisited to help print a clear picture of the effect fake news and surveillance capitalism. For the former issue, two case cases have been revisited to understand the nature of fake news and their affect from three different perspectives. These include; Twitter account hacking of Associated Press and Fake news of Syrian President Assad’s death.

On 23rd April, 2013, Tuesday, at 1:07 p.m., a Twitter post on the official account of the Associated Press (AP) with more than 2 million followers, one of the most influential American news agencies, reporting two explosions at the White House allegedly causing President Barack Obama injured, shook up the world. Within a few minutes, the original tweet “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured” generated several thousands of retweets with numerous uncontrolled variants and reaching millions across the world. When the other agencies verified this news, it was found that the news of attack was fake and AP twitter account had been hacked. The diffusion of the fake news of a terror attack panicked the Americans and people across the globe. Just after 1 minute, at 1:08 pm, the Dow Jones had a short-lived nosedive. The market dropped close to 150 points, from 14697.15 to 14548.58, before it stabilized at 1:10 p.m., when news of AP account hacked began to spread. As a direct outcome, the Dow Jones plunging 147 points within 3 minutes, one of the notable drops in points of its history. Just after the confirmation of twitter hack of AP, the stock market recovered. However, by that time, the panic of the terrorist attack wiped away $136 billion dollars in the equity market value (Manash P Goswami July, 2018)

On 6th August, 2012, at Monday, at 9:59 a.m. European Standard Time (EST), a Twitter message claiming to represent Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev caused in the rise in price hike by $1for crude-oil per barrel. In the first tweet from @MiniInterRussia, later deleted, shocked the world stating “Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had been killed or injured” A few minute later, two tweets followed claimed that his death had been confirmed. The Russian Interior Minister responded to the fake news of Assad’s death and denied tweeting any message in this context. “This account is an hoax created by Italian journalist Tomasso De Benedetti”- V. Kolokoltsev (@MiniInterRussia, August 6, 2012. As consequence of the fake news of Assad’s death, the market panicked in just 16 minutes after the first tweet. Dragging the market with the fake news, the price of crude oil started to increase, topping out at $91.99 a barrel by 10:45 a.m. Finally, the oil prices closed at $92.20 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Later, when the archive of @MiniInterRussia account, which was never the official account of Kolokoltsev, was examined, it was found that it regularly attempted to spread death rumors. (Manash P Goswami July, 2018)

A surveillance scandal involving Facebook exploded in 2018. In 2015 a political consulting company, Cambridge Analytica (CA), specializing in influencing voters, obtained access to personal data mined from 87 million Facebook users (Davies 2015). A Cambridge University social psychologist named Aleksandr Kogan built an app to harvest data from unwitting Facebook users. They were asked to take a survey from which psychological profiles were constructed and intended to predict their behaviour. The users were unaware that the data would gain access to their friends, or that another company, CA, was involved. (David Lyon, 2018)

It is to grasp the immense power and profitability of personal data and to see why not only corporations but government departments, health-care systems, educational establishments and of course policing and security initiatives are so eager to follow the Big Data bandwagon into new realms of user-transparency, efficiency, productivity and power, ( David Lyon, 2018) that social media companies engage in surveillance capitalism.

Results and Discussion

Fake news is a reality. Whether for economic or political gain, fake news in some form has long been with us, the product of professional persuaders. However, the digital media ecology has proliferated, democratised and intensified the scale of fake news. (Vian & Andrew, 2018) If we look at the statistics only among the social media giants, there are nearly 2 billion Facebook and 330m twitter account holders. With such a huge number of Facebook and Twitter account holders spending a considerable amount of time each week, it is definitely possible that a large number of eye balls have come into contact with fake news stories or campaigns with misinformation. Now, let’s imagine, if a fake message is reaching over at least 1 billion people a day.

Although, we have discussed in the paper of spreading fake news over only popular social media site-like twitter, but it’s not always twitter to blame for spreading such fake news. Social media sites like Facebook, Goggle and numerous others have been the carrier of such propaganda messages. It is simply because of social media sites encourage to share, like, follow, etc. Thereby, allowing what could be an exponential spread of such messages with little efforts from those responsible to propagate such false news. (Manash P Goswami July, 2018)

Internet has become a surveillant space that also smudges the distinctions between monitoring and tracking activities of security agencies, police and corporate marketers and advertisers on the one hand, and the surveillance initiatives of everyday life, on the other. What security agencies, police and corporate marketers do is hard to discern, for a number of reasons, including agency and commercial secrecy. But everyday surveillance is not well researched yet, either. Finding out about others, or ‘social surveillance,’ has many faces, from the relatively benign searches for classmates or potential romantic partners, to surveillance of groups and individuals that some wish to ‘name and shame’ through forms of ‘digital vigilantism’ (Trottier 2017).

Time is one of the most important investments that should not be spent on things that does not count. It is saddening also to believe one thing which is far from truth and even worse spend your energy in circulating it. Governments should also take measures to protect their citizens from manipulating Social media sites which breach their data policy and sell these data to third parties for advertisements, or demographic studies. Many regions around the world are trying to get serious about thee two key issues that we are discussing fake news and data privacy. We have seen an increase in number of cases that are presented to the courts. For instance, not long-ago Uber, a mobile app for taxi operations was charged millions of dollars over data breach. This should be replicated in various social media platforms.

Conclusion

In these modern days, social media has become integral part of the peoples’ lives. And as such should be taken as a serious issue when it deals with data privacy and news that is spread through these platforms. Based on serious effects that issues discussed can cause to the community, it is important that social media sites be regulated. Laws and policies have been formed yes, and more are still in the pipeline. The major puzzle that authorities will have to deal with is enforcing these laws. As earlier said, Social media is a complex and dynamic system. Actually, users register with these sites without government interventions and there is nothing they can do to stop that from happening. They are completely out of control. There should be very huge penalties for defaulters of the regulations that are already put in place.

This era should form the age of exploration for legal bodies to keenly look into the matter of surveillance capitalism, its potential threat to users’ data and formulate strict laws to protect the interest of the people. From the case studies, we saw how spread on fake news can cause a shift in economy and affect millions of lives and as such, the platforms through which they are spread should be strictly regulated. Regulations however, should not conflict with public interest but for the public interests.

Appendices

The fake tweet on AP hacked account, causing the Dow Jones to fall on April 23rd, 2013, erasing $136 billion dollars in 3 minutes in equity market value.

A series of fake news on a fake Twitter account from @MiniInterRussia

The price crude oil soaring high with the breaking of the fake news on Assad’s death

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