Social Media: Information Communicator or Destroyer?
By Harshita Chandgothia for ASA Institute for Risk and Innovation –
In this digital age, the number of ways to disseminate information has grown exponentially over the last two decades. The internet has gone from an era of Netscape browsers and dial-up connections to an infinite hydra of constantly updating social media sites, with thousands of hours of content uploaded by the minute. These social media platforms contain impossible amounts of footage that cannot be deciphered or verified. This paper will talk about whether these information distribution platforms are able to successfully communicate their content to the consumer or whether the real information gets destroyed along the way. Unconsciously, has the internet become a hub of services where information can be easily plastered? The question now is whether the damage is permanent to our communication systems: are social media platforms slowly transitioning to being adopted as information weapons?
Social media has taken over as the new form of communication. It entails platforms ranging from Wikipedia (a site that brings together human knowledge) to Instagram (a site for daily entertainment). In 2015, there were reportedly 2.07 billion users of social media globally. Fast forward to six years later, we see a jump of 2 billion in this internet engagement rate.1 The tremendous growth of technology in recent decades has allowed this massive expansion of access. For instance, if we take the Philippines as an example of a developing country and the
United Kingdom as a developed country, the historical usage rates in the two are significantly distinguishable but the gap is narrowing fast. From 2017 to 2026, the percentage of social media users is projected to rise by almost 40% in Philippines2 and around 26% in the latter.3 This difference highlights the increase in accessibility of information that has allowed lower socioeconomic populations to jump onto this bandwagon. Social media platforms are indeed talented profit-seeking businesses, working by securing strong relationships between the user
and the machine interface, be it a smart phone, a tablet or a computer. As the expansion gathers momentum, firms’ ability to extract profits multiplies, propelled by a much wider audience outreach. Monetization by selling advertisements that are cloned to a user’s interests is an infamous but widely prevalent and extremely successful strategy employed by these digital experts.4 A positive response from such sales incentivizes the producer to continue with the data inferencing, creating a virtuous cycle involving the platform owner, the product owner and the consumer, to a certain extent. However, the liberties of the internet do lead to forms of customer abuse at the hands of the platform owner. Misinformation and fake news have blinded many at the cost of information and entertainment. The phenomenon of matter is the social dilemma: are the benefits enough to outweigh the costs? For more, click here.