Back in 2003 when Mark Zuckerberg started a light website using 'facebook' photos of Harvard University alumni, calling it Facemash, he was accused of privacy violations and misleading the Harvard Crimson (the student newspaper) as to the purpose of Facemash. (Student alumni photos were retained by the Harvard Crimson in a book commonly called 'facebook'). A year later 'the facebook' emerged initially for students of Ivy league students only and then in 2006 facebook itself was launched. Zuckerberg settled some of the legal challenges from co students who accused him of 'stealing' their ideas by offering four of them 1.2 million shares of Facebook when it when public. Zuckerberg dropped the prefix 'the' from the name 'the facebook' and ended up buying the domain of fb.com for over $4 million. Fifteen years later Zuckerberg still faces major investigations and legal challenges which range fro privacy violations, to data misuse and content violations.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and many recent social media apps have created a paradigm shift in social behaviour ushering a new era of 'connectivity' and engagement that as of 2020 boasts of 3.6 billion worldwide users. It is estimated that over the next four years another 1 billion users will be added to these platforms. When social media platforms emerged they moved the one to one chat model of internet connectivity to an open platform of engagement. In so far as the aim was to keep friends and family on a common platform for staying in touch the 'social media' was spot on. A user could post their activities, photos and thoughts for their friends and family and in a crucial sense created a likeable platform.
In the every essence of connectivity for keeping in touch with friends lay the may ills that social media today carries within its platforms. As people could 'friend' other people whom they did not necessarily know, connectivity was said to have expanded our circle of 'friends' and therefor our influence. Initially people added others with similar interests and then posted content that attracted a bigger following. In Feb 2009 Facebook for example introduced the 'like' button, and with it came the implication that one could dislike some content too. Soon across all social media platforms reports of abusive comments and 'trolling' of people one did not like started to occur.
It was not long before political figures and parties started to cash in on this massive 'captive' audience of social media users and not only did the content get more political the emergence of hate content was seen on a scale that was and is scary. In a sense users felt the social media offered them anonymity, and did so in cases where people could set up fake accounts. In the run up to the 2016 election the extensive use of social media, especially Twitter by Donald Trump, and in many cases with false 'tweets', was a crucial factor in his election victory. Racist and divisive content was seen more on social media and it was not fuelled by conspiracy theories and fake posts.
It was not surprising that social media companies were called to task and many of them appeared in Congressional hearings on how these companies had failed in stopping the platforms being misused. In the ten years since social media began concern emerged over the way manner in which they collected user data and then used that data. Things came to boil when it was revealed that social media companies were selling user data for use by political parties. At the core of this was the Cambridge Analytica purchase of data of 87 million users of Facebook.
Social media companies have tried to reign in the misuse of their platforms and most of this has been in reaction to the investigations in USA and UK against them. Yes fake accounts have been removed, (as much as 250,000 per month) and abusive users have been banned, the most high profile being the former US President Donald Trump, yet there is a growing suspicion that social media companies cannot really put the genie back into the bottle without fundamental and structural changes to how they organise their business.
Social media companies do not charge the user for the use of the platform. However, as their user base increases they acquire an 'eyeball' value that is of immense interest to advertisers. User behaviour and navigation and search experiences are all captured and then advanced algorithms are used to 'target' advertising to the users. Herein lies the problem for social media companies, because just as advertising can be funnelled to a specific user so too can content that matches their profile. So assume a persons 'likes' and navigates to racist content on both the social media or the web, this then allows algorithms or place matching content to user.
So far then defence that social media companies have placed forward is that while they do remove the content that if offensive they do to 'target' such content to the users. They further stated that content only gets directed to a suer in response to their own content posting. In a recent research experiment a dummy account was set up on social media and this account never posted any content but merely navigated to offensive content and nothing more. Within six weeks of the account being set up it was noticed that content that was offensive was appearing as suggestions to the user account. While this was not a broad based experiment the basic finding of the content channeling is troublesome.
Social media companies do not want to modify the algorithms for fear that it may affect their main and perhaps only source of income which is advertising. In time however it is more likely that companies will have to adopt an open architecture approach towards their algorithms and adjust them to filter content. Needless to say this is an expensive operation and could well set back the social media income stream.
While these measures will deal with some of the macro problems that we see on social media there is no doubt that the one to one abusive comments and content cannot be policed so easily. In some cases the use of artificial intelligence to filter posted content has been partially successful, but this method cannot be used for dealign with one on one abusive comments and posts. Most likely social media companies will have to deploy hundreds of moderators who can deal with such complaints. This is an expensive proposition and is likely to have significant impact on the profitability of social media companies.
There is a growing feeling amongst users that social media platforms have become toxic and while it remains an addictive part of many peoples lives it is more than likely that if the way social media works is not changed more users will be disillusioned. Indeed there will always be the toxic user who thrives on a response to an offensive post to troll further with even more offensive posts and perhaps in the end social media will of use to only such users. However realistically the connectivity that social media brought into our lives have been welcomed where used positively. Smart social media companies will have to think of ways to retain such users, till such time we can watch the monster of social media battle those who want to tame it sensible and respectable behaviour.
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