Gone are the days when social media, most notably Facebook, were merely platforms where friends and family could connect and keep up with each other. Mark Zuckerberg’s simple vision of a connected world have become complicated, dangerously politicized, and messy. It seems that the medium has shifted from a space where users connect and flaunt their social lives to a space that displays users’ political discontent. While conversations surrounding politics are certainly important and key components of our American democratic system, they have seemed to flood social media pages like Facebook, and maybe not for the better. I believe that these democratic conversations are most valuable and effective to change when they are done face-to-face. I am no sociologist or psychologist, but I would like to believe that in-person conversations are more civil and conducive to positive change than conversations that exist behind an LCD screen.
This may all seem to come out of the blue and raise the question, why? Why are we even having this conversation? And why do we care? Last semester, I wrote my Senior Thesis on the incident of the Facebook Russian advertisements, analyzing and studying how they were created and shared, and it was in studying these advertisements that it became eerily clear how much Facebook has changed in recent years. This research further conveyed that Facebook is no longer just a place to connect with friends and family, but is now also a platform to display (divisive) political rhetoric.
In the year leading up to the 2016 presidential elections, and even after the elections, Russia purchased and displayed Russian-created advertisements that algorithmically specifically targeted certain Americans (depending on the type of advertisement) with the intent to divide them as they each shared these faulty advertisements. The advertisements were racist, xenophobic or Islamophobic, and were shared thousands (sometimes even hundreds of thousands) of times. Scary. How and when did Facebook become a warzone for dangerous and violent political rhetoric? How did this happen? The democratic conversations that took place on the platform have to some extent been reduced down to merely “shared” content, with no knowledge of where such content came from, and what such content means.
This past week, Facebook came forward, admitting that it might actually be damaging to healthy democratic conversation and discussion rather than conducive to it, citing the Russian advertisement incident as evidence for this. Facebook’s Civic Engagement Product Manager Samidh Chakrabarti said, “’…as unprecedented numbers of people channel their political energy through this medium [Facebook], it’s being used in unforeseen ways with social repercussions that were never anticipated’”, further admitting the medium was slow at recognizing how “‘bad actors were abusing [the] platform’” (Kennedy). I appreciate the honesty from Chakrabarti, but I find that conclusion disheartening and rather troubling. Though Facebook is working to better filter through future advertisements to better understand their source and intentions, the damage has been done, and it is going to take lots of work to fix the problem.
So what is the future of Facebook, especially if the social media giant admits its own platform’s flaws and negative societal impact? Is there a benefit in this “new” Facebook, the one that offers space for conversation and discussion (which for democracy is essential)? Or can Facebook even be a place for this conversation anymore, especially if these conversations can be influenced by faulty advertisements created by deceptive trolls? I certainly don’t have the answer. Only time will tell.
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/22/579732762/facebook-sa…