Mob Media

De: Frans Bollack

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Duración: 35 m

Resumen del Editor

Social media's rise over the last 15 years has been astonishing, and it has given a voice to billions worldwide who would have lived a lifetime and never been heard. The business model of social media is understood by few outside the programming community and, sadly, very few in government. Social media at its core can be very social, but the amount of connections that can be made is ungoverned and, in certain circumstances, can lead to deindividuation. People's right to Freedom of Speech, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution in the US, is an important part of individual liberties in conjunction with the right to Internet access. This is exploited by Meta and other social media companies globally as people feel free to express themselves, but when looked at psychologically, social media platforms don't mirror human interaction and social behavior in real life. We are cognitively predisposed to know and communicate with only about 150 people at a given time, and the average human can only memorize about 5,000 faces. Thus, social media's governance and design can be mentally harmful to users and result in mass social unrest. Social media companies have been incorrectly protected in the US by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which was never intended to protect organizations but individuals. Social media platforms are organizations profiting from the sale of advertising and algorithms that promote information that is trending to increase profits. With a lack of liability and oversight, this has resulted in mental health problems of users, public unrest, and forcing authentic journalism to become entertainment, tabloid-style news. With artificial intelligence, social media platforms can suspend accounts for activity that isn't opinion and defamatory or untrue in nature and should, until it can be moderated by a representative at the organization. Unfortunately, the vast majority of governments have turned a blind eye toward the administration of social media platforms, the negative impact that they have on human behavior, and the algorithmic promotion of disinformation and defamation that occurs on these platforms. Social media sites must be treated as newspapers by the Federal Communications Commission, users must be limited to 100 connections per account or register as journalists, and platforms must be designed in accordance with human cognitive ability and make-up in conjunction with increasing accountability for interactions between users. Governments must consider that these platforms contain very little actual communication as most of its non-verbal hypertext, which can lead to mass confusion and must recognize that this has and will lead to public unrest the longer that it goes ungoverned. Social media sites may own user data, but they are responsible for the interface that is used, overseeing individual users behavior, and 100% of the content that crosses their servers! Governments should have an Internet kill switch that assists in protecting states against cyber-attacks for national defense as it's impossible to ensure public safety in today's world without such a tool. As Internet adoption and AI tools become increasingly ubiquitous, the Internet will as well, which means susceptibility to nefarious actions increases in concert with greater adoption. If one feels that restrictions on social media platforms are unnecessary, please feel free to open your own social media site, host it, develop the app, register it at the Google Play Store, and file an application with the FCC!