Contemporary societal issue on the internet and implications for digital citizens and interpersonal online communication

 

During the last few years, ‘fake news’ on the Internet is a much widely discussed issue.  The term “fake news” is generally defined as news that is false and has been generated for creating political bias or causing public disorder. The ubiquitous access to social media (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, twitter, youtube etc) has created a global audience who are prone to be manipulated by ‘fake news’. This is because companies have capabilities to get a detailed profile of each social media user from analyzing their data from all sort of sites users visit. Once a profile is created it is very easy to pro-actively send targeted advertisements and ‘fake news’ to influence that person’s decision making capability. Kosinski et al. (Kosinski, 2013) have shown how easily accessible digital records like Facebook likes can be used to predict automatically and accurately personal attributed like political view, religious, sexual orientation, age, gender, relationship status etc. On top of that, companies also found out ways to trigger people’s emotion so that they feel an urge to react by reposting or forwarding the ‘fake news’. Another research (Berger, 2011) have shown how people are more likely to pass on information when they are physically or emotionally aroused.

 

We have seen effects of this high-tech propaganda machine that feeds and roams on the Internet doing havocs in terms of creating violence, fuelling mass genocide, toppling democratic governments and overall affecting our own decision making capability. We have become puppets of big media companies. With this on set, the key social media companies have been put under pressure to take responsibility of this evil use of technological superpower. However, it seems that the very business models of these companies depend on rapid spread of content/news, irrespective of the contents legitimacy or intend, to generate more views which translates to revenue. Although the social media services are free to use, the companies rely on  targeted advertising to cover the running cost and to generate unprecedented profit margin.  For example, Facebook’s gross profit margin from 2016-2020 averaged 83.7% and is one of the top five most profitable companies in the world.

 

It is true, that not all aspects of social media is bad, it also created lot of opportunities for business, given voice to activists to expose corruption and put pressure on controversial government policies, helped bridge the digital divide and was an effective tool in rescue operations and many more. However, beyond these good the bad is prevailing by destroying the true nature of our social norms, values and expectations. One of the ways we can diminish the negative effects of social media is through educating users so they can become habituated with an easy way to harness emotional intelligence to refrain from consuming and spreading fake information. The book titled Web literacy for student Fact-Checkers" by Mike Caulfield can be a great resource for starting educating ourselves (Caulfield, 2017).

 

 

References:

 

 

Berger, J. (2011). Arousal Increases Social Transmission of Information. Psychological Science, 22(7), 891–893. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611413294

 

Caulfield, M., & Open Textbook Library,. (2017). Web literacy for student fact-checkers.

 

Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., & Graepel, T. (2013). Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(15), 5802-5805.