As an avid user of social media myself, I was curious as to how easy and how much it costs to influence my opinion a certain way. Once I did my initial research it became clear to me that social media was being manipulated and being done on a massive scale. For example, during the 2016 presidential election in the United States Twitter had “36,00 bots which tweeted 1.4m times”. These bots are fake accounts that share materials when set off by certain triggers. After more research I learned that these bots were generally conservative leaning and a large number of them could be traced to Russian troll farms which are where Russian agents actively try to manipulate social media. Also, I learned about the business model of social media platforms which involves pushing as much content to as many people as possible to get ad revenue. This meant that social media platforms trying to stop the spread of fake news that was being used to manipulate people's opinions on certain topics would make companies lose money. This gradually lead me to become interested in how this manipulation could be stopped and weather it should fall on the government to regulate social media or if social media companies needed to regulate themselves. As previously mentioned if social media companies regulated themselves to stop the spread of fake news they would be losing money so they cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. On the other hand governments like Russia were the agents who were actively trying to manipulate social media so governments could not be the ones trusted to regulate social media. This lead me to the conclusion that social media could only be regulated by a balance of both social media platforms and governments.
|
|