User:LGreg/sandbox/Approaches to Knowledge (LG seminar 2020/21)/Seminar 18/Truth/Truth in social networks

Truth in Social Networks

Truth in social media has awakened many serious debates on privacy, corporations, democracy vulnerability and AI database systems as fake news are more and more present. Fake news in twitter, for example, travel six times quicker than true facts. They are inevitably favored as they attract more people and provoke bigger responses on the public side. The business plan on which social media constructed itself is at the heart of why fake news are ultimately present: adds . Companies use digital plateforms to gain new consumers and established specific contracts with individuals or groups to show their ads, which makes the addiction of customers the real product in this whole virtual business.
Therefore, ads are needed by the companies to be more visible and necessary for social platforms to survive, and the consumer's addiction is the real objective. Fake news are the results of people wanting to provoke responses on the consumer's side, to gain more visibility. The rapid expansion of social networks and technology throughout the population resulted in a lack of established laws against the violation of individual privacy. Computer's processing power has undertaken one of the highest growth becoming a million times more powerful in 30 years which means that much more data could be recorded. Facebook's trials developed a case upon article 230 that stipulates that those companies are immune to the content from their consumers found on their platforms. Edward Snowden is an example of one of those who realised how much data was being collected and tried to alert people about it. This data being collected, ads are more accurately distributed amongst consumers, resulting in a virtual prosperous circle for social media.

How Social medias are the new form of justice

Social media has become a unique way for someone to make his voice heard by many, which has lead to individual sources of protestations and deliberative judgement of others based on their actions or their sayings. Indeed, a powerful tool has been offered to populations, nowadays named as "mass society" which was a phenomenon already seen through the French Revolution, where people entered politics not through institutional reforms but through revolts and rebellions, forcing their way in. This mirror our today's model of social media as people are thriving for justice without having substancial notions about it, often based on emotional social responses. The Me Too movement saw the upcoming cases of men on social plateforms being judge by lambda citizen. This new form of justice has developed itself upon misleading informations that unables people to determines whats' fundamentally true or not.

The ethical dilemna of AI

AI has become more and more present in our technological industry, and its principal utility in regards to social media is to detect fake news. Comparing and analysing datas are ways to detect the authenticity of a source of informations. The system needs an important amount of specific datas to be able after to differentiate valuable and non-valuable sources, to be afterwards trusthworthy. However, contestations arised on the viability of AI and how it could be biased. Algorithms could be executed in specific ways for AI to be more in favor to notice certain types of news and not others. Therefore, even technology that is learning by itself can be questionable upon its viability as it's humans that are providing the informations required for it to learn.

Social media and democracies

Concerns about truth in social media created new controversial paradigms of greater interactions between the public and the government but at the same time greater political vulnerability. Indeed, social media data collections are useful for governements and allows people to directly engage with political figures , giving a growing importance to the social media. By misleading people through false accusations or incorrect datas, masses can be easily used into one political direction, easily becoming a threat to governmental authority or in some cases being used by governments. In non-democratic countries such as China, social media are often governmental tools or massively verified which doesn't give to individuals the right to express themselves freely. However, as it is the case in democracy, growing parts of the society have the possibility to be politically active, without having the necessary political background to adress those issues becoming a threat to democracy.