Social Media: Challenges, Opportunities, and More
Billionaire Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, Inc. promises many interesting plot twists. A billionaire doesn’t need ad dollars to run a bare-bones organization, and after expected layoffs, Twitter will become much less costly to run from afar. Will Musk use his new site as an AI playground, or will a subscription-based model make a higher form of content moderation possible? No matter what occurs with Twitter, all social media companies face fascinating challenges and opportunities.
Introduction to Social Media
Most people think of Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, TikTok, Tencent and other digital platforms when they hear "social media," but others view the medium as a surveillance and data tool capable of abuse as well as diversifying existing voices. Lawyers and legislators recognize not only privacy and free speech issues, but the opportunity to harmonize digital standards, particularly between the EU and the Americas. (If you're American, set your VPN to Germany to compare experiences browsing online.) Meanwhile, high-ranking military leaders seem to have delegated psy-ops to the NSA, which created USCYBERCOM in 2009 and which helped elevate the command into an independent unit in 2017. Regardless of one's vantage point, the need for regulation, both locally and globally, has become obvious as "fake news" proliferates and as foreign agents manipulate the open and cost-effective access granted by social media platforms. (See SUPPLEMENTAL STATEMENT OF REASONS OF VICE CHAIR ALLEN DICKERSON in MUR 7623, in which it is alleged a Russian corporation influenced the 2016 American presidential election with only 80 employees, 1,000 ads, and 70,000 USD while operating approximately 3,800 accounts on Twitter, 470 on Facebook, and 170 on Instagram.) When technology companies are capable of restricting information arbitrarily while allowing false information to spread in unencrypted and encrypted communications, social media becomes a tool and a challenge for everyone, including politicians, often at the expense of the individual.
Impact of Social Media
At first, social media promised the ability to widen social circles based on common interests. Text messages were sent in chatrooms, and much of the content focused on games, particularly video games.(1) Images couldn't be displayed in the earliest chatrooms, but some creatives would use characters to make simple pictures prior to GIF, JPEG, and other formats. Today, social media has transformed online discussions--not just political ones--from words and text into images and algorithms. The cost of the aforementioned shift has included, at the very minimum, the destruction of most print media, which began to prioritize clicks rather than quality content in an attempt to compete for ad dollars. (During the dot-com bubble, some online print publications were valued at hundreds of millions of dollars under the assumption reduced costs would be permanent.)
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Few could have predicted that magnifying the lowest common denominator would become an acceptable business model; worse, social media platforms used their newly-gained positions as cultural influencers to become the most powerful data aggregators in the world--but without severe consequences for mining or revealing personal information. Some astute observers have argued "if it's free, you're the product," but warnings are useless when human nature finds voyeurism, gossip, and convenience irresistible. As our privacy diminished in ways that would have made the 1975 Church Committee weep, we heard "information wants to be free," and the whole world dangled before our fingertips. Yet, any medium in which facts--previously vetted by newsroom editors--could now be published equally by Ph.Ds and teenagers seemed to level the field by removing referees. Absent rules, fair play seems foolish--even more so when ad dollars begin flowing to fewer and fewer participants--but a debate allowing everyone to participate for free seems favorable to one where the government picks and chooses who can be heard. After all, why deny the underdog or the unheard a voice?
Post-Citizens United, in which the Supreme Court allowed not only more speech but more anonymous speech, the question of free speech--and voting--became more complex. Few of us have a problem letting the highest bidder advertise a consumer product to a particular group, but is it right to give a billionaire more power to influence an election than a millionaire or a typical college graduate or a typical construction worker? A society driven by context-free computations obviously renders the role of regulator more challenging, but Citizens United forced regulators to contend with an even more crowded playing field, though not necessarily one where they could see all the players. As political spenders realized the power of a platform to denigrate opponents, including but not limited through the use of altered images, political discourse inevitably became cruder. At times, it appeared the two political parties had set up PACs designed solely to mock their opponent's platforms by taking viewpoints to extremes while purporting to support the opponent's party. (e.g., Question: how much should underpaid teachers earn? Answer: they're priceless, so hundreds of billions of dollars wouldn't be enough. I don't mind a tax increase, and neither should you. Schools are cheaper than prison.)
Meanwhile, legislators continued to apply a laissez-faire approach to regulation, perhaps trusting courts to do their job for them. Throughout American history, the three branches of government constantly compete for influence, with some branches temporarily gaining more credibility than others, but the balance of power has always favored equilibrium in peacetime. In the United States, the greatest impact of social media may be the elevation of the executive--both corporate and political--at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches, which have failed to protect the individual and honest political discourse.
Positive Impacts of Social Media
"The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence." -- Elon Musk
Prior to social media, if you wanted to meet someone in a different city or foreign country, you'd need an intermediary or substantial assets. If you wanted to travel to a new city, your primary source of information might be from biased advertisements or travel agencies. We may complain about quality and veracity, but no one disputes social media removes friction from being exposed to new people and new ideas. Furthermore, small businesses previously had to resort to clunky websites susceptible to cheap DNS attacks if they wanted to attract a following or advertise a product with the same skill as major consumer conglomerates. Today, because of Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms, a small business anywhere in the world can effectively advertise services and products at a low cost. Visit any country with USA military bases that has substantial tourists, and go to a non-corporate-owned coffeeshop or restaurant. More often than not, you will see the logos of American social media companies on your cup and/or the establishment's entrance. No one disputes the power of social media for small businesses or for networking, and no one wants to return to the old days of buying a small box ad in a newspaper and not knowing how many people saw it.
Also, say what you want about all the online cat videos, but education is now more accessible. There are people on Instagram teaching languages in ways better than any class you could take at a local college. (@hebahsrollercoaster is one of my favorites.) It's not just languages--anyone who posts an accurate, filter-free photo of a place you've never seen before is adding to your education. If we include YouTube's DIY videos as part of "social media," then the entire world may very well be at your fingertips--as long as you have time to sift through all the choices.
Another overlooked benefit of social media is the ability to show people they are not alone or at least not as unique as they might think. Imagine being the only homosexual or religious minority or immigrant or aspiring physicist in a smaller American city. If the NY Times or local newspaper is your main source of information, you might never know thousands of other people are having the same experiences as you. The ability to share your life requires bravery, and the more people who do it, the easier it becomes for others--perhaps even you--to join in. Such active, diverse participation allows the "outsider" the power of expression while granting majority or "insider" populations access to the "outsider's" life. In an ideal world, such courageous expressions would resemble an Oprah Winfrey marathon, i.e., a series of interactions promoting empathy in ways previously unimaginable.
Online content need not be expert to make an impact. For example, on Instagram, you can find a male teenager living on a Native American reservation. The content is repetitive and basic but also funny. To the non-indigenous American who finds him, it might represent his or her only authentic experience into Native American culture. More importantly, Instagram has allowed an individual without a publishing house, without substantial assets, and without exceptional talent--at least for now--to make it harder for anyone to mislead the public about Native American teenagers.
Negative Impacts of Social Media
It's true the average person's attention span has declined since the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but people tend to forget how miserable and myopic life was back then. If the cost of easily accessible information is a shorter attention span, the cost-benefit analysis clearly favors social media after a certain age, i.e., after a child's brain has had a chance to master the analog world.
At the same time, the more content out there, the harder it is to find something, so one complaint is that social media is inefficient and therefore an unforgivable time waster. If a 15 years-old male spends ten hours a week online and sees just one interesting non-pornographic video, and that same 15 years-old would have been outside exercising or reading a book in 1992, then social media has failed society. (He may have watched TV instead of browsing online or reading, but most people in 1992 would watch only certain shows at certain times.) Continuing my example above, if 100 Native Americans post videos on Instagram, and 98 of them lack talent, the chances of us finding the singular or the budding talent in the bunch depends on a fickle audience, your history of online clicks, your online friends, and/or luck. It's easy to forget now, but in the era of newspapers, the value of traditional media wasn't only in pretty words and analysis--it was in locating, sometimes through confidential sources protected by law, that one individual out of a hundred who deserved an audience. With gatekeepers, charges of elitism are inevitable, but also the potential for higher quality and less static. Is there a Mozart or Faulkner out there right now whom we cannot find because the newspapers and their sources and ad revenue have diminished, and the algorithms are focused on the latest statements by entertainer Kim Kardashian or Kanye West? ("I always act a fool, ow ow / Ain't nothing new, now now")
Regarding American entertainment, various outlets have always sought the lowest common denominator, but rarely were they lionized. When given competent options, most people preferred media that tried to elevate the discussion. You may argue today's mainstream media lacks competent options, but if you think broadcast TV was generally competent, watch the movie Network (1976). Prior to TMZ, there was--and still is--the National Enquirer. Yet, everyone knows when they see a National Enquirer article that it is entertainment, not legitimate news. In contrast, on social media, it is not always clear what is entertainment and what is news, especially when algorithms favor photos and videos over words. It is of course possible to take words out of context the same way as a photo, but false or manipulative written attribution is more readily discovered than an altered photograph, so the latter is more common than the former.
Moreover, as Neil Postman explained in 1985, words require consideration of what is said before and after in order to be comprehensible, whereas a photo lacks a "before" and "after" and is merely a snapshot of an arrested moment. As summarized by Aubrey Nagle, Neil Postman "theorized that not only does the medium affect how the message is received, but that it also affects what types of messages can be sent... [so] not only does a TV or the printed word affect our relationship to its content, but it also establishes what kind of content we can create, what conversations we can have in society. For instance, it’d be difficult to have a philosophical debate using smoke signals." The medium may not be the message, but it can dictate the kind of messages and content you receive, and therefore your complexity of thought. In a democratic republic, especially one as complex as the United States, the ability to handle increased complexity of thought is vital to a shared positive future.
Speaking of government, governmental incompetence and corporate malfeasance--at least in public--is now more difficult to hide if witnesses are present. Before George Floyd, there was pre-social-media Rodney King. (Interestingly, in the King beating, the officers were acquitted; in the Floyd incident, the officers were convicted. Did social media remove the presumption of integrity from police departments, thus affecting the jury pool's mental calibration of "reasonable doubt"?) Video cameras during Rodney King's time were analog, making alteration of content extremely difficult. No one watching the King video believed they were watching anything other than the truth. Today, that video you see of an incompetent government official or a superstar acting sadistically may be edited in a way that removes context, therefore presenting a lie through incompleteness. Are we really better off with more terabytes of information if just 15% of those immediately accessible terabytes present a lie through false editing or lack of context? Setting aside falsity--which can occur offline as well as online--social media's biggest threat is something almost everyone praises: its quest for order. Imagine a bookstore that only shows you books based on your prior purchases and your friends' prior purchases and wishlists. Would you enter that bookstore? I assume not--and I assume your intelligence would be insulted if I even asked you the question. The human experience relishes randomness as well as order. With AI and AI-driven content moderation, the danger is that order eliminates randomness. A compromise in this battle between diversity and order is to harness social media as an integral part of the physical world, i.e., like mustard on a hot dog. (If anyone reading eats hot dogs without mustard, I hereby banish you to the metaverse for life.) The digital world needs limits because it is inherently infinite, but no one wants to impose limits because the possibilities are also infinite. Yet, what if social media was attuned to your physical individual world and functioned as a complementary part of that world rather than just an alternate universe of more imaginative replicas? We already know mobile phones capture, if the microphone is on, all conversations occurring around us. What if social media was able to pick up a classroom conversation about the book, All Quiet on the Western Front, accurately place it into an academic context (rather than an offhand or social reference), then present to you, the next time you opened Meta or YouTube, relevant videos, links, and posts by German history and literature professors translated into perfect English *at your comprehension level*? Game-changer, right? (Note: one can see immediately the importance of open-access digital libraries containing material vetted by librarians and other high-value source material in the quest for balance between order and diversity online.) In the end, any medium openly discussing sex, politics, religion, and relationships will cause social problems to appear more severe than reality. Pre- and post-WWII, the physical world has dealt with such problems through religious and racial segregation. No wise person believes that approach is viable any longer. The keys moving forward are 1) how to best incorporate social media into a person's individually-unique physical world; and 2) how to best protect, store, and anonymize the collection of personal data required for the aforementioned task.
Social Media and Bullying
The number of tragedies not possible prior to social media is heartbreaking. The case of Audrie Pott in California is particularly gruesome, as it proved affluence and academic distinction are no guarantees of better social behavior. There is already agreement that young children, teenagers, and adults ought to be treated differently on social media. The issue is how to implement proper and effective safeguards when the very foundation of social media promotes oversharing as well as cliquishness. The "mean girl" once limited to a single derogatory comment in the hallway now has virtually unlimited time and opportunity to lambast anyone in the entire school. How can a teacher, coach, or counselor know what is happening without obliterating a student's privacy? The question mirrors national security debates: how much privacy should we sacrifice for greater security, and is there a line after which we have lost something culturally essential? Personally, I believe the solution to online bullying requires an analog solution, i.e., a kind of a hotline modeled after whistleblower protection measures. No student wants to be known as a "tattletale" or "snitch," but if s/he can alert someone outside the district who has the ability to get a FISA-style warrant to investigate further, we may be closer to an effective remedy. (Why not think of school bullies as terrorists and apply similar legal constructs and checks and balances?) At a minimum, the entity investigating must have buy-in from an independent unit in the local police department or state cybersecurity agency; the investigative entity must be independent; the entity must be funded from a separate source than the school district and have a minimum funding guarantee; and so on. Such a construct, however, compels another question: who watches the watchmen? How do we know the investigative unit is honest and fair? The answer? We don't. DHS, TSA, and CBP still exist despite numerous mistakes, as do many feckless IA units, but the hope is that if oversight fails, then the story gets to the media--both social and traditional--and a Bill Moyers, Edward R. Murrow, or Mary Mapes causes reform through publicity and good investigative reporting. In other words, it's the same old story: independent people disconnected from the Establishment get real reform.
Social Networking and Catfishing
Though most people associate catfishing with dating, corporate espionage and intelligence recruiting are far greater issues. "On the internet, no one knows you're a dog," a comic once joked, but no one also knows if you're really a CEO or venture capitalist or a military veteran. A Twitter-style verification seems like the most obvious solution, except for two issues: first, in order to grant the "blue checkmark" or other signal of authenticity, users must present official documents to tech companies, which allows them to harvest private data while increasing the risk of inadvertent disclosure; second, the most controversial speech, including but not limited to whistleblowing, is often only possible if users are guaranteed privacy. Moreover, even when whistleblowers manage to disseminate information to journalists, a government may cite espionage or other security-based laws to arrest or expel the third-party disseminator of information. As such, the best path to combating catfishing is a face-to-face meeting, which is still not foolproof given the ability to create masks mimicking another person's face. No perfect system exists, and one sees why local institutions, including religious institutions, remain influential. Seeing someone once a week in person is still the best way to guarantee authenticity.
Mitigating the Negative Effects of Social Media
Given the expected move to more traditional forms of communication--private chatrooms, videoconferencing, face to face meetings, etc.--if we are able to transform social media into a secondary and complementary tool rather than a primary one, then we may be able to attain the best of the digital and "meatverse" worlds. In the meantime, content moderation remains key, and like any other human-involved business endeavor, success depends on the quality of the team and the standards imposed on that team.
"The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It's what YouTube makes, it's what Instagram makes, it's what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff and disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff." -- Nilay Patel
We all know improvements in social media will not occur if human beings render judgments about acceptability in inconsistent ways. At the same time, a panel of experts for every misguided or factually suspect post is not possible, and police departments have little desire to increase their workload. A competent social media company will do two things, at a minimum, to improve user experience: first, require all users who desire verification to have a videochat with a human being to verify information and require follow-up videochats at least every six months; and second, remind users to use the "blocking" function liberally while also allowing users to "downgrade" posts in their feed in order to correct an errant algorithm. (On Twitter, my experience was substantially improved after adding the terms "kpop," "bts," and "blackpink" to my list of tweets never to show me.) Beyond the obvious steps I just mentioned, each social media company--just like each traditional media company--needs to determine how to make their content more relevant in more meaningful ways. The advantage of social media is that it can do everything regular media can do while also tailoring its content specifically for each individual. And yet, it is clear from anyone who has used social media that every platform's algorithms overshoot and fail to achieve the right balance between randomness and order.
As we move forward, it may be helpful to recognize, once again, that all problems that exist on social media also exist in the real world. For example, when academic history and literature departments were accused of elitism and a lack of diversity, no university substantially changed its regular curriculum. Instead, they added new departments, i.e., African-American studies, Chicano studies, etc. In short, their solution to a lack of diversity or a lack of randomness was to impose segregation on the ivory tower, thus mirroring the same "solutions" favored by business and governmental interests in the past when confronted with issues of social division and inclusion. Despite American universities' clearly sub-optimal approach, I was able to gain the information I sought as a student by visiting every area of my UC Davis campus bookstore, which now includes more information than ever before. The trick for social media is to make itself into a bookstore or movie theatre you'd want to visit while relegating the theme park areas to sideshows. Once again, these are not new problems, but the economic prospects of physical bookstores and movie theaters indicate solutions are harder than one might expect. And yet, regarding movie theaters, I'm struck by how popular they are in Asia. A movie theater in a prosperous Asian city generally has large, very comfortable seats. A human being is not required other than to gain entry because tickets are purchased on electronic kiosks listing all the information you need, including languages displayed on-screen. (In some countries, a Malay movie might have captions in Tamil, Chinese, and English.) Some action movies cause your chair to move at certain times, and once, I was sprayed with actual water as the hero flew across a lake. Many malls in Asia are rundown, but even the ones where half the storefronts are closed or empty have well-attended movie theaters that show movies from all over the world. There's a lesson in there somewhere for social media executives, who should recognize--like Netflix--that diversity, accessibility, and worldwide content are crucial.
As we seek solutions, remember that for all of its ill effects, social media's ability to expose us to information and people we'd never otherwise meet is unprecedented. Today, your ability to see information is not determined by a few newspaper editors or television executives. When someone complains a fútbol match featuring a popular striker has received 3.3 million views compared to 82,000 views for a speech by Kurt Vonnegut, just remember: that's 82,000 views more than zero, and 82,000 views available outside a library and local school system.
Conclusion
Social media, in and of itself, does not present fundamentally new problems; however, by amplifying existing problems globally within an easily-manipulated, pictorial-based medium, it presents new challenges. In the beginning, as the World Wide Web became too vulnerable to cyberattacks, social media and apps were considered safer conduits to a more global economy, where anyone, anywhere, could advertise a product or service, and any writer or pundit could test his or her views. Yet, the more open and open-minded a tool, the greater the chances of harm from malicious actors. Because such actors are global, global cooperation is necessary to create a more honest marketplace of both ideas and products. (Notice I said "more honest," not "honest.") As ideological and military-driven wars--and the battle to control the narrative--rage in various parts of the world between governments, businesses, religious institutions and individuals, diplomacy appears less likely as everyone fights harder to keep the status quo operational. Will the world see more value in a Singaporean-style system in which protestors are restricted to a single park in the entire country, and where all online statements must be factual at risk of bankruptcy, or will we manage a more liberal outcome? The answer remains contingent on levels of cooperation between corporate and governmental executives; whether technology is capable of creating seamless and "free" processes through which photos and videos can be verified as authentic; and whether speech-based legal standards can be agreed upon within economic trade zones and preferably also exported without major modifications to other regions. Unfortunately, individual users may continue to be an afterthought without a form-based (i.e., California's judicial council forms) system where pro se litigants are able to force social media companies into a neutral platform to resolve disputes. Such legal deficiencies are at least partly responsible for rising influence of corporate and political executives at the expense of the legal profession within the quest for a more perfect discourse. Until the metaverse becomes complementary to the so-called "meatverse" rather than a stand-alone or sci-fi proposition, problems will persist. As usual, human ingenuity, not AI, will fix them.
© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2022)
ISSN 2770-002X
1. Ironically, we appear to be back at "square one" as CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been advertising smaller and more private areas within Meta for families and others preferring greater intimacy.
2. Social media is a "nuance destruction machine." -- CEO Jeff Bezos
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