Estimated reading time: 6 minutes 4 seconds
So far, we have read great things about social media, who are true too, to an extent. But there is something else, hidden, influential, and dangerous lurking behind those booty pics, adrenaline rush videos, and much other interesting content present on various social media platforms.
Now, we can ask, “what could probably be wrong behind interesting content? it is fun and a good time-pass better than listening to these losers blabbering beside me.”
Well, again what is worth attention, is a matter of perspective. But the question is, what is the effect of such content on other paradigms of our personality?
An election rally going violent is surely a very interesting video to watch, and often get lots of views on social media sites. It must be interesting to see people dodging police water gun in creative ways.
But, at the same time, we are also creating perceptions in our mind, perceptions, like our world, is such a violent place, or we start disliking the government unknowingly, of course, we don’t know the whole side of the story, but the one shown to us.
So, I am going technical now. Please bear with me, I respect your time. 🙂
There is a theory that our personality is made up of five basic traits. We call them O.C.E.A.N. Personality traits (Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism)
O- How open we are for new experiences
C- How well we execute tasks
E- Extrovert/Introvert
A- friendly/compassionate vs. challenging/detached
N-sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident
I copied above from Wikipedia, and I am not an expert in this. But I do have a perspective about it. These five traits are the building block of our behavior towards other people and our reaction towards circumstances.
In the 2016 US election, a company with name Cambridge Analytica was working on the Donald Trump campaign, and they were scrapping content from 30 Million Facebook profiles of US voters.
Now, somehow from the activities of these people, like likes, comments, surveys, etc. They computed the OCEAN traits of these US voters. And, divided them into various groups.
One such group was called ‘persuadable’. This is that group who can be easily persuaded and hence can be made to vote for a particular candidate, President Trump in this case.
In close elections like the 2016 US elections, these swinging voters are very crucial for the success of either political parties.
Till now, we saw a use case of using personal information. Only this resulted in the election of a man, for the post of the world’s most powerful person. Right now, we don’t know how it affected our common life, but I am sure in the future when we will reflect this time, we would be able to connect the dots.
The question is, is it right to play with the psychology of people?
We can argue, that what is wrong in targeted messages when we are not asking anybody to forcefully view our content or do anything about it. Well, yes using psychographic information of a population is better than throwing a grenade on them. But there are two main reasons why this is wrong.
1) High Stakes!
Unlike, advertisements of shoes, accessories, apparel, etc. who are shown based on our browsing data. Campaigns around political ideologies can have a long-lasting effect on the whole society. Hence, the stakes are much larger.
We all hear news related to recession around the world economy, experts can give you multiple reasons behind it, but as a vigilant human, I can also observe things around, and I can say, that one of the most prominent reasons which triggered this situation is US-China trade war.
Now, we have to understand, that recession is not a commodity or a process, instead, it’s a mindset. A pessimistic mindset. That’s all.
When people’s trust in the market, and economy as the whole start getting deteriorated, they start hoarding money with themselves. The money which could be invested and created jobs and prosperity is rotting with the investors, and they are afraid to put it on someone or something.
Simple because they are not much hopeful about the future.
If we are currently going through a global recession, is it a result of that data mining and targeted influence done by Cambridge Analytica in 2016?
I know, this question could be vague, but is it wrong? I doubt
2) It’s fucking personal!
The second reason why I feel this is wrong is, that the data related to the psychography of a population is very confidential.
We all have weaknesses and sensitive emotional spots in ourselves, but all these things are very personal to us. And, we decide to share ourselves with people we want to, that too in the way we want to.
Now, if someone with no empathy towards us starts computing our emotional behavior, that too without our consent, and use it for the personal gain of their clients. How should we feel? Helpless? Betrayed? Or insecure?
The bottom line is, that there is no harm in showing personalized content to us, but the data used to compute the same should only be used with our permission, more importantly, the intended use of our data should be known to us.
When we are sharing our personal feelings and emotions on social media, we intend to share it with our family and friends. Also, the most important underlying basis of this transaction is our trust in those social media platforms.
We are grateful that we can connect to distant people with the help of social media, but at what cost?
We might not be very significant right now, but what if we will be in the future. Can someone pay some money and take out intimate and personal information about us from social media platforms?
Now, I am confused about what to say, this is the same confusion people are facing while deciding steps and measures to control the vulnerability of our data present on social media.
What can we do?
Obviously, we don’t want to stop sharing our happiness and views with our friends, but we don’t want someone to use this and predict our behavior, and more importantly, using it to influence our political outlook is unacceptable.
Governments are talking about Data localization, in fact making it mandatory. But, in the world of cloud computing, does the physical location of the data matters? I doubt.
Also, if we are privileged to ask our data to be deleted by social media platforms, what kind of data we want to get removed? Maybe many of us know the answer, but what about the majority of social media users, who are not well educated and informed.
In the worst-case scenario, if social media platforms are selling our data, we can’t do much about it. But we can surely look into how we consume the information presented to us.
We can surely start by unfollowing all the pages pretending to be selling political ideologies. Whether we like them or not, they are always biased towards the person paying for it.
Instead, we should follow only the reputed media houses, all of them. Because even if all of them are biased, all of them can not be biased towards one, simple law of competition. And for us, the important part is to get the whole story, which is only possible through different mouths.
Many of us have this habit to get our daily dose of news from Facebook or Instagram. We need to make a clear distinction regarding the abilities of different social media platforms. They are for entertainment and connecting with our friends and family, and not intended to tell us who is the better person to vote for.
If someone is trying to do that, it is better to stay away from them, no matter how attractive they might look. Though, there is nothing bad about learning new things from others, to know who is on the other side of the screen is very crucial.
Imagine, Social media is like an open field full of people. They are standing together and blabbering, some of them are just hopelessly listening to others, while other smart folks are busy influencing people in the crowd.
Some of them are getting money to feed particular information to the people around, hence with the use of loudspeakers they are shouting at the top of their voice.
Surely, we will hear them, and we will hear many. But do we want to believe them, I don’t know.
Do we have to believe them? I don’t think so.
Even if we decide that only information which will be allowed to shape our perspective should be from an authentic source, we can cut out the majority of these irrelevant noises.
If we can make sure, that social media influence is not working on critical issues like politics, culture, economy, religion, etc. We will find less money getting spent on such dangerous ideological campaigns and more on normal marketing, which is a win-win for all.
Social Media is a boon, no doubt about it. But, so is water and fire, and we all know how people die of drowning and burns. Hence, it is completely in our hands what we make of it.
Let’s keep the boundaries clear and enjoy the full potential of social media.
All the best!
An Observer 