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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.

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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