Hatred and Division: Is Social Media to Blame?

 Hatred and Division:  Is Social Media To Blame?

It is hard to watch the news lately without feeling a sense of despair or hopelessness. Headlines are filled with acts of violence, hatred and division across the world and within our own country. People who disagree on topics ranging from mask mandates to politics to women’s rights seem further apart and less willing to compromise (or even listen to a different viewpoint) more than ever before. Even more frightening, we can’t even seem to agree on basic truths or objective facts anymore (as illustrated by the term “fake news”), let alone figure out how to fix things. What has caused this growing intolerance and division?  

https://abcnews.go.com/US/ways-spot-disinformation-social-media-feeds/story?id=67784438

One contributing factor seems to be the spread of misinformation or highly biased information across social media platforms. A recent Facebook experiment demonstrates the power of social media algorithms and reveals that users are likely to be exposed to content that increases division and intolerance by reinforcing only one perspective/viewpoint. A researcher set up a Facebook account in India in order to understand how social media might affect perspectives about current events in that county. The researcher accepted all of Facebook’s recommendations for friends, groups and videos. The result was terrifying: “an inundation of hate speech, misinformation and celebrations of violence.” The researcher reported that his new feed became “a near constant barrage of polarizing nationalist content, misinformation, and violence and gore.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/23/technology/facebook-india-misinformation.html

Aside from presenting biased and one-sided information, social media is a common source of outright lies, conspiracy theories and other misinformation. In fact, the World Health Organization defined the term “infodemic” as “too much information including false information in digital and physical environments” which can lead to mistrust in health authorities and negative health consequences. https://www.who.int/health-topics/infodemic#tab=tab_1 Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all allow misinformation to be spread quickly across the globe, reaching thousands or even millions of users in a matter of hours. The consequences of this crisis are serious and widespread. There have been threats to our nation’s democracy based on false information about elections, threats to public health based on misinformation about events ranging from Covid and vaccine safety, to violent attacks based on conspiracies or propaganda circulated by extremist groups. One widely publicized example of this danger is the 2018 “pizzagate” incident in which a man fired a semi-automatic rifle in a Washington, D.C. pizza place based on his belief that it was the center of a pedophilia trafficking ring led by Hillary Clinton. This fake story was promoted by various extreme websites and then re-tweeted in countries across the world. https://www.cits.ucsb.edu/fake-news/danger-social

There is no easy solution to this problem. Social media platforms are not going away and eliminating hate speech is unlikely. Companies should be required to take a more active role in regulating content or in changing the algorithms that control what users see on news feeds so that a more balanced flow of information is presented. 

In addition, since it would be impossible to regulate all content, it makes sense to focus regulation on topics that pose serious threats to human rights and health issues. For example, even though there may be misinformation about a wide range of topics currently circulating on Facebook, resources should focus on regulating content that contains scientific lies about vaccine safety and which therefore affect the pandemic crisis. Recent news reports illustrate that the vast majority of hospitalized Covid patients who had refused to get the vaccine based their decision on false information about infertility, government tracking or other unproven claims spread on Facebook https://www.cbsnews.com/news/faceoff-against-facebook-stopping-the-flow-of-misinformation/

At the very least, it is time for the general public to understand that what we read on social media is not necessarily objective neutral news reporting, but rather biased (and at times unreliable) information specifically targeted at users, based on algorithms created by corporations.