Social Media's Frankenstein

Colin Murnan 

colin.murnan@gmail.com

 

It's no secret that social media has played a huge role in the world's cultural revolutions in recent years. With the rise of platforms like Twitter and Facebook, it's easier than ever to get a glimpse into what's happening not only in your own country but also across other continents. 

It seems almost utopian to think that we could have this kind of information at our fingertips, able to see people getting mistreated and having justice swiftly and immediately taken to correct unjust actions. 

We've seen this with the video of George Floyd, where thousands of Twitter users reposted, re-shared and have given an eyewitness account of gross misconduct committed by a police officer. 

Videos like this have impacted society and may even have led to the movement happening now, in which Black Lives Matter protestors march nationwide, chanting the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, among others. 

But questions arise as the power of social media continues to grow. Can we trust everything we see on social media, even if at first it looks believable? 

Social media videos are often short, rarely over two minutes. Even snippets as long as this aren't enough to gain accurate context for any given situation, so the casual onlooker will shift whatever they see into their own biases. 

 Picture source: https://professorramos.blog/2018/08/10/social-media-a-monster/ 

And that's not the only problem. 

A Harvard student creating a "hot or not" site has now engineered a political Frankenstein capable of swaying elections by foreign interference. Mark Zuckerberg may now be one of the social media kings vested with the power to censor the president if he sends out a social media victory celebration too early. 

How in the world did we get here?

Doctored photos, edited videos and sensationalist journalism has been around for decades, and now things are showing no signs of slowing, as unregulated tweets are being shot out at millions of followers at a time from some of the world's most influential people. It's a little frightening to find out that this all may literally be available inside your brain at some point as well. 

How, then, do you regulate this kind of flow of news? How do you inform people of "real" news when they're being force-fed fifty different versions of it? 

Gone are the days when citizens of the United States only had three nightly news stations to pick from. It seems far too late to try to turn back now, amidst the frenzy of news platforms now screaming for your attention. Maybe, then, it falls onto the individual. Those in authoritarian or military regimes sometimes don't have the luxury of receiving accurate news, so often they have to dig for information, talk to others, collaborate and find some semblance of truth. 

This could be a solution in the United States. An active, curious mind, capable of sifting through questionable news, matching biases against one another, collaborating with others to find out what happened -- this might be the future of news in the United States, where everyone has a kind of journalistic approach to how they see the world.