Society manipulation with Social Media

You won’t believe how many people were manipulated during the election of president Donald Trump. In 2016 pro-Russian trolls posted more than 80’000 Facebook posts about the elections. All in all the posts of the russian agents may have reached more than 126 million Americans.

“Many of the ads and posts we’ve seen so far are deeply disturbing — seemingly intended to amplify societal divisions and pit groups of people against each other”, Facebook counsel, Colin Stretch, Independent

So no one really can tell what would have happened without the manipulation.

Facebook’s effort

Facebook has hired 7’500 specialists who monitor the content on the platform. But as I mentioned in my first blog post there are 50’000 links posted every minute. So do you think Facebook hired enough people to control all the posts and links?

Additionally Facebook is in the test phase to filter fake news with artificial intelligence. They used an AI software to find suspicous behavior during the election in Alabama and they successfully found several fake accounts. But AI isn’t at that point where it is able to analyze content. It cannot understand sarcasm, racism or cultural context.

They also invented the feature that next to the publisher of an article is a blue checkmark. It should tell you if the publisher is reliable.

 

Blue checkmark

But the problem with this functionallity is that it is very inconsistent. Some publishers are marked and some aren’t. Furthermore videos aren’t evaluated which are the most used medium to spread fake news.

What could Facebook do against fake news and harrassing posts?

 

 

War against cyberbullying

Cyberbullying is a term that popped up in media more often in the last few years. Unfortunatley it is a problem that gets worse and worse. The following chart is from 2014 and the figures got even worse since then.

Image via nobullying.com

The case of Amanda Todd

Actually I don’t feel good when I talk about cyberbullying cases but it is the only way that people might realise how bad it is. Like the majority of teenagers Amanda started using video chat in her seventh grade. A guy convinced Amanda to show her breasts over a video chat. He blackmailed her but she didn’t accept. The picture was populated in the Internet and school mates started to bully and laugh at her. She tried to move school but the initial bully always circulated the picture in the new school.

“Every time she moved schools he would go undercover and become a Facebook friend.” Amanda’s mother, Carol Todd, NoBullying

Probably you can imagine how the cases ended. The good news are that the stalker was found and got punished.

The role of Facebook

I hope Facebook realises its responsibility after cases like this. Facebook established the feature to report a person, a post or comments. Buth this feature isn’t working very well. A reporter was harassed by the same man several time.

“Then I did some googling of my own. Turns out he’s wanted by Interpol on charges of inciting genocide and has been on the run from police for several years.” Shalailah Medhora, ABC

She reported it over and over but she always received a auto-generated message which mentioned that no abuse was found. However the abuser was clearly guilty and a dangerous person.

BBC did the same experiment with different harassing posts. The result was the same. Out of 100 reported contents only 18 got removed.

Extent of posts

It is mandatory that Facebook improves the report feature and makes it easier for users to notify bad behaviour of others. But viewing that from the perspective of Facebook another issue comes up. Having a look at the statistics of the Social Media giant you will realise it’s pretty difficult to check every post and comment.

Image via CreamGlobal

It might be that Facebook is overwhelmed with checking all the reported posts.

Importance of education

But you can’t only blame Facebook. The users need to be educated more aswell. Every user needs to know how they can protect their privacy and make their information private. Especially younger people who aren’t aware about the dangers and possibilities in the Internet should be informed accurately. Teachers could include in their classes Social Media experiments like CJ Marple did.  He wanted to show his student the power of social media and posted a tweet.

“The Kansas teacher says he expected 1,000 or so retweets, but within days the tweet went viral and gained more than 227,000 retweets and 75,000 replies from users all over the world.” NPR

This example sums up the power of Social Media very accurate. Facebook is still in its early phase and new features and regulation must be developed. But it is also questionable if the users are sensible enough? Do they need more education about the Internet and Social Media?