WhatsappSocial Media was already an enormously powerful tool before the Coronavirus pandemic. Bots, meaning, programmed people or fake people, are a major part of what appears today. Influencing lives via social media is often described as the most powerful method of creating and spreading ideas in the history of mankind.
So, is social media inherently good or bad? No, but it sure is powerful. Google has enormous power in how it has created the most powerful search algorithm and influences how search is done today. But the power of social media goes way beyond that. Social Media allows people to penetrate communities in ways that have never existed until now. Anyone who speaks a common language with anybody on the other side of the world, can now reach hundreds and thousands of people that they would never have been able to reach in the past.
The digital information war is alive and well, and is probably just as important as military wars. Disinformation wars are going on all around the world. An important point that is brought up in this video is that allegedly false news travels more quickly than facts. But not just more quickly – ten to twenty times as fast. So, the entire issue of false news and digital robots are a huge issue that must be dealt with.
Marc Zuckerberg identified several kinds of fake accounts. Spammers are people without ideology who are economically inclined. State actors are absolutely ideologically and politically inclined. But the problem that Tribe Journal points out is that the idea of self-policing breaks down due to the amount of money involved. The massive social media companies are now in charge of deciding when billions of dollars should be rejected from a State sponsor of internet robots that are all designed to influence public opinion on a massive level. The solutions may be complicated. But in some way, the situation of the massive power that is held by the social media titans needs to change. The absolute power that a few companies now have is the biggest threat to society today.
