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FatimaIsmailFirstEssay 3 - 27 Nov 2024 - Main.FatimaIsmail
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> | Social Media: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (final draft) | | | | |
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Social Media: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
-- By FatimaIsmail - 25 Oct 2024 | >
> | -- By FatimaIsmail - 26 Nov 2024 | | |
Introduction | |
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< | The rise of social media as a popular means of content creation and sharing among virtual communities and networks has led to both positive and negative outcomes with regard to news content in particular. On the one hand, social media has been used as a means to obtain the truth in an age in which misinformation and biased news is spread by traditional news broadcasters, while on the other hand, social media has led to the proliferation of fake news. These opposing outcomes expose the need for a solution which recognizes the broad protections afforded to fake news by the First Amendment and ultimately balances democratic principles of free speech with the dissemination of news that is true. | >
> | The rise of social media as a popular means of content creation and sharing among virtual communities has impacted traditional media outlets in myriad ways, calling into question the dominant narratives of contemporary issues as projected by these news outlets; reshaping the competitive landscape; and ultimately threatening the preeminent position of traditional media sources. The second notable effect has been the democratization of the news generating landscape, enabling ordinary citizens to become ‘citizen journalists.’ On the one hand, while social media has exposed bias spread by traditional broadcasters, the converse is also true, that social media platforms have also been responsible for the proliferation of fake news. The conundrum is thus the greater diversity of views owing to social media presence, coupled with the generation of fake news. | | | | |
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< | The Good | >
> | The Good | | | | |
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< | In a world in which traditional news broadcasters are effectively controlled by third parties with specific political agendas, it is often difficult to ascertain what is impartial, truthful news and what is biased news intentionally aired to skew the narrative and further the agenda of those who control the station. As a result, people have turned to social media to obtain the truth. | >
> | It is true that we live in a complex dynamic world, yet the dissemination of news via traditional outlets has tended to remain simplistic and often one-dimensional reflecting the biased and skewed narrative of these broadcasters. | | | | |
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< | One topical example in which a television news broadcaster has intentionally presented misinformation to the public occurred just a few days after October 7 last year. In the wake of the events, CNN was found to have staged a report in which its correspondent and her team sheltered in a ditch near the Israel-Gaza border during a rocket attack while an off-air camera directs the correspondent to “try and look nice and scared”. Sceptical of the actual threat of harm depicted by CNN in this report, viewers uncovered the dramatization of the event by the correspondent which ultimately led to these viewers turning to social media platforms to “spread the word” that the report had been staged. | >
> | One topical example in which a television broadcaster has intentionally presented a skewed narrative to the public occurred just a few days after October 7th last year. In the wake of events, CNN was found to have staged a report in which its correspondent and her team sheltered in a ditch near the Israel-Gaza border during a rocket attack while an off-air camera directs the correspondent to “try and look nice and scared”. Skeptical of the actual threat of harm depicted by CNN in this report, viewers uncovered the dramatization of the event by the correspondent which ultimately led to these viewers turning to social media platforms to “spread the word” that the report had been staged. | | | | |
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< | A study conducted by The Nation on the double standards of media coverage of the war on Gaza, specifically, CNN and MSNBC’s coverage, found that these broadcasters focused significantly on the plight and suffering of Ukrainians and Israeli’s in the first 100 days of the respective conflicts with a view to portraying Ukrainians and Israeli’s in a more humanising manner, which ultimately led to shaping the public’s perception of these conflicts at the expense of the truth. | >
> | A study conducted by The Nation on the double standards of the media coverage of the war on Gaza, specifically, CNN and MSNBC’s coverage, found that these broadcasters focused significantly on the plight of Ukrainians and Israelis in a more humanizing manner, which ultimately led to shaping the public’s perception of these conflicts at the expense of balanced reporting. | | | | |
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< | Due to the distrust in traditional news media as an objective source of news, people are increasingly choosing social media as a means to uncover the truth. While there is no doubt that social media has resulted in the spread of fake news as will be discussed below, it has simultaneously (and ironically) been used as a tool to ascertain the truth. | >
> | The increased distrust of traditional media mirrors the distrust that people have of elites in general. Hence people are turning to social media to stand in as an “arbiter of truth”. | | |
The Bad and the Ugly | |
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< | The rise of social media has created an epidemic unique to the modern technological age – the epidemic of fake news. From war and conflict, to elections, fake news does not discriminate. | >
> | The rise of social media has created an epidemic unique to the modern technological age-the epidemic of fake news. From war and conflict, to elections, fake news does not discriminate.
With respect to war and conflict social media platforms have also been used to propagate false narratives. In the aftermath of October 7, videos depicting children being pulled from rubble, captioned in Hebrew and tagged with the hashtag #freeisrael went viral on TikTok? claiming to be taken in Israel (it was later reported that the footage was taken years before the conflict and was not actually footage from Israel). | | | | |
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< | With respect to war and conflict, while social media platforms have been used as a means to ascertain the truth as discussed above, these platforms have also been used to propagate false narratives. In the aftermath of October 7, videos depicting children being pulled from rubble, captioned in Hebrew and tagged with the hashtag #freeisrael went viral on TikTok? claiming to be taken in Israel. On the contrary, pro-Palestinian content has been shared on platforms claiming to be destruction in Gaza which was later found to be old footage from a scene demonstrating the aftermath of an earthquake in Afghanistan. | >
> | On the contrary, pro-Palestinian content has been shared on platforms claiming to be destruction in Gaza which was later found to be old footage from a scene demonstrating the aftermath of an earthquake in Afghanistan. | | | In the context of elections, AI has been used to generate fake news globally. Ahead of the previous national elections in Germany, TikTok? accounts had been used to impersonate political figures, while in the Philippines, myths circulated on social media accounts led to the son of a dictator winning the presidential race. | | | In the US, in the lead up to the 2020 elections, specific Facebook pages which disseminated misinformation were viewed 10.1 billion times. Facebook created the conditions for such information to be proliferated by failing to adjust its algorithms in order to prevent the spread of this information which ultimately led to the insurrection. | |
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> | | | | The Solution | |
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< | Given the expansive First Amendment protections afforded speech, the remedy for preventing fake news online is, ironically, not more regulation of social media platforms. Instead, traditional news broadcasters should be required to report the truth, to convey news in an as impartial a manner as possible, and to be barred from portraying news in a manner in which advances the agenda of those who control it. In addition, news broadcasters ought to be required to disclose who funds their stations in order for the public to be aware of who effectively controls these stations and the narratives they advance. | >
> | As demonstrated in the preceding paragraphs, both traditional media and social media face a legitimation crisis. While Mark Zuckerberg stated under Congressional cross examination that “[social media platforms] do not want to become the arbiters of truth. That would be a bad position for us to be in and not what we should be doing”, given the immense power and influence that social media platforms have had on the public perception of significant issues (including war, conflict, and elections), social media platforms have in fact become “the arbiters of truth.” What then, you may ask, is the solution? | | | | |
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< | The lack of effective regulation of traditional news media is what has led to the reliance on social media as an alternative source of the news. This is largely due to the fact that accurate, on-the-ground news is what people want, and in the absence of trustworthy news from traditional sources, social media is the only available option. | >
> | The solution is for social media platforms to self-regulate to a greater extent than they are currently doing, to prevent the spread of fake news. In this regard, social media platforms could employ a number of mechanisms to assist in preventing misinformation and disinformation, such as providing users with a list of sites and accounts that have previously shared fake news and alerting users that certain sites and accounts are questionable. In addition, social media platforms could also implement more stringent controls to prevent bias in their algorithms which would reduce the risk of “echo chambers”. In other words, if social media platforms tweaked their algorithms so that users are not exposed solely to content that supports their own views, this would decrease the risk of political polarization and prevent, for example, extremist views. | | | Conclusion | |
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< | The shift away from traditional news media to social media in order to obtain the truth, demonstrates the distrust in news broadcasters to provide impartial, truthful news that does not favour any political agenda. While social media can at times be a source of truth, it ironically is also a source of misinformation. Misinformation disseminated on social media platforms can have significant impacts on the public perception of war and conflict, and the outcome of elections. In democracies in which the right to free speech is paramount even at the expense of fake news, the solution to reducing the harms stemming from the proliferation of fake news on social media and the resulting attack on democratic principles, is to provide for greater responsibility of traditional news media outlets to report the truth in an impartial manner. This would ultimately have the effect of reducing the need for people to search for alternative sources of the truth.
I find this argument confusing. Requiring news outlets to "report the truth" means penalizing them for not reporting what some agency or court finds to be "the truth." How is that consistent with any form of the right of free expression? Who funds publicly-traded corporations? Would that not be the public shareholders?
I also don't understand the concept of objectivity in use here. Historians, with access to all the documents and the benefit of long hindsight, will not agree on a single "truth" about—to take examples at random—the battle of Antietam, the Eastern European policy of NATO after 1989, the responsibility of Slobodan Milosevic for the massacre at Srebrenica, or the influence of Iroquoian political thought on the French Enlightenment. Why would we expect journalists, working with utterly imperfect information, mostly hearsay, against overwhelming time pressure under inadequate conditions to convey "the truth" about complex social occurrences with a certainty of accuracy in reporting and correctness of interpretation that historians cannot achieve?
This is not really a draft about social media, it seems to me, but rather about the unrealistic expectation that human beings can acquire an adequate understanding of the world around them without effort, breadth of study, and cultivated critical intelligence. You are both describing an enacting the conundrum of gaining through the new species-wide nervous system the capacity to acquire immensely greater quantities of information while simultaneously undermining the slowly-gained and costly skills in analysis and interpretation that we have built up over the last several thousand years.
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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> | While social media has exposed the reporting bias advanced by traditional media outlets which has led to the questioning of the dominant narratives advanced by these outlets, social media platforms are simultaneously responsible for furthering the dissemination of fake news. Misinformation and disinformation disseminated on social media platforms can have significant impacts on the public perception of war and conflict, and the outcome of elections. In light of these harms, the solution is for social media platforms to impose stricter self-regulation mechanisms on themselves to decrease the spread of fake news. This would ultimately have the effect of reducing misinformation and disinformation, thereby enhancing the legitimacy of the information shared on these platforms. |
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FatimaIsmailFirstEssay 2 - 16 Nov 2024 - Main.EbenMoglen
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Social Media: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
-- By FatimaIsmail - 25 Oct 2024 | | | The shift away from traditional news media to social media in order to obtain the truth, demonstrates the distrust in news broadcasters to provide impartial, truthful news that does not favour any political agenda. While social media can at times be a source of truth, it ironically is also a source of misinformation. Misinformation disseminated on social media platforms can have significant impacts on the public perception of war and conflict, and the outcome of elections. In democracies in which the right to free speech is paramount even at the expense of fake news, the solution to reducing the harms stemming from the proliferation of fake news on social media and the resulting attack on democratic principles, is to provide for greater responsibility of traditional news media outlets to report the truth in an impartial manner. This would ultimately have the effect of reducing the need for people to search for alternative sources of the truth. | |
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I find this argument confusing. Requiring news outlets to "report the truth" means penalizing them for not reporting what some agency or court finds to be "the truth." How is that consistent with any form of the right of free expression? Who funds publicly-traded corporations? Would that not be the public shareholders?
I also don't understand the concept of objectivity in use here. Historians, with access to all the documents and the benefit of long hindsight, will not agree on a single "truth" about—to take examples at random—the battle of Antietam, the Eastern European policy of NATO after 1989, the responsibility of Slobodan Milosevic for the massacre at Srebrenica, or the influence of Iroquoian political thought on the French Enlightenment. Why would we expect journalists, working with utterly imperfect information, mostly hearsay, against overwhelming time pressure under inadequate conditions to convey "the truth" about complex social occurrences with a certainty of accuracy in reporting and correctness of interpretation that historians cannot achieve?
This is not really a draft about social media, it seems to me, but rather about the unrealistic expectation that human beings can acquire an adequate understanding of the world around them without effort, breadth of study, and cultivated critical intelligence. You are both describing an enacting the conundrum of gaining through the new species-wide nervous system the capacity to acquire immensely greater quantities of information while simultaneously undermining the slowly-gained and costly skills in analysis and interpretation that we have built up over the last several thousand years.
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You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines: |
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FatimaIsmailFirstEssay 1 - 25 Oct 2024 - Main.FatimaIsmail
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| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
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Social Media: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
-- By FatimaIsmail - 25 Oct 2024
Introduction
The rise of social media as a popular means of content creation and sharing among virtual communities and networks has led to both positive and negative outcomes with regard to news content in particular. On the one hand, social media has been used as a means to obtain the truth in an age in which misinformation and biased news is spread by traditional news broadcasters, while on the other hand, social media has led to the proliferation of fake news. These opposing outcomes expose the need for a solution which recognizes the broad protections afforded to fake news by the First Amendment and ultimately balances democratic principles of free speech with the dissemination of news that is true.
The Good
In a world in which traditional news broadcasters are effectively controlled by third parties with specific political agendas, it is often difficult to ascertain what is impartial, truthful news and what is biased news intentionally aired to skew the narrative and further the agenda of those who control the station. As a result, people have turned to social media to obtain the truth.
One topical example in which a television news broadcaster has intentionally presented misinformation to the public occurred just a few days after October 7 last year. In the wake of the events, CNN was found to have staged a report in which its correspondent and her team sheltered in a ditch near the Israel-Gaza border during a rocket attack while an off-air camera directs the correspondent to “try and look nice and scared”. Sceptical of the actual threat of harm depicted by CNN in this report, viewers uncovered the dramatization of the event by the correspondent which ultimately led to these viewers turning to social media platforms to “spread the word” that the report had been staged.
A study conducted by The Nation on the double standards of media coverage of the war on Gaza, specifically, CNN and MSNBC’s coverage, found that these broadcasters focused significantly on the plight and suffering of Ukrainians and Israeli’s in the first 100 days of the respective conflicts with a view to portraying Ukrainians and Israeli’s in a more humanising manner, which ultimately led to shaping the public’s perception of these conflicts at the expense of the truth.
Due to the distrust in traditional news media as an objective source of news, people are increasingly choosing social media as a means to uncover the truth. While there is no doubt that social media has resulted in the spread of fake news as will be discussed below, it has simultaneously (and ironically) been used as a tool to ascertain the truth.
The Bad and the Ugly
The rise of social media has created an epidemic unique to the modern technological age – the epidemic of fake news. From war and conflict, to elections, fake news does not discriminate.
With respect to war and conflict, while social media platforms have been used as a means to ascertain the truth as discussed above, these platforms have also been used to propagate false narratives. In the aftermath of October 7, videos depicting children being pulled from rubble, captioned in Hebrew and tagged with the hashtag #freeisrael went viral on TikTok? claiming to be taken in Israel. On the contrary, pro-Palestinian content has been shared on platforms claiming to be destruction in Gaza which was later found to be old footage from a scene demonstrating the aftermath of an earthquake in Afghanistan.
In the context of elections, AI has been used to generate fake news globally. Ahead of the previous national elections in Germany, TikTok? accounts had been used to impersonate political figures, while in the Philippines, myths circulated on social media accounts led to the son of a dictator winning the presidential race.
In the US, in the lead up to the 2020 elections, specific Facebook pages which disseminated misinformation were viewed 10.1 billion times. Facebook created the conditions for such information to be proliferated by failing to adjust its algorithms in order to prevent the spread of this information which ultimately led to the insurrection.
The Solution
Given the expansive First Amendment protections afforded speech, the remedy for preventing fake news online is, ironically, not more regulation of social media platforms. Instead, traditional news broadcasters should be required to report the truth, to convey news in an as impartial a manner as possible, and to be barred from portraying news in a manner in which advances the agenda of those who control it. In addition, news broadcasters ought to be required to disclose who funds their stations in order for the public to be aware of who effectively controls these stations and the narratives they advance.
The lack of effective regulation of traditional news media is what has led to the reliance on social media as an alternative source of the news. This is largely due to the fact that accurate, on-the-ground news is what people want, and in the absence of trustworthy news from traditional sources, social media is the only available option.
Conclusion
The shift away from traditional news media to social media in order to obtain the truth, demonstrates the distrust in news broadcasters to provide impartial, truthful news that does not favour any political agenda. While social media can at times be a source of truth, it ironically is also a source of misinformation. Misinformation disseminated on social media platforms can have significant impacts on the public perception of war and conflict, and the outcome of elections. In democracies in which the right to free speech is paramount even at the expense of fake news, the solution to reducing the harms stemming from the proliferation of fake news on social media and the resulting attack on democratic principles, is to provide for greater responsibility of traditional news media outlets to report the truth in an impartial manner. This would ultimately have the effect of reducing the need for people to search for alternative sources of the truth.
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list. |
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