The contradictory role of social media: a conduit for good and terrible evil
The more we enslave ourselves to social media, the more susceptible we are to its corruption.
On December 17, 2010, Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire. Unable to find work and selling fruit at a roadside stand, Bouazizi had his wares confiscated by the local municipality. Humiliated, he went to complain to the governor, but was refused an audience.
In an act of sheer desperation and protest, Bouazizi set himself alight on the street outside. His self-immolation led to his tragic death, but also triggered protests that began as a ripple, but ended up a tidal wave of dissent that consumed a region. The fatal despair of one man, an anonymous street vendor in Tunisia, became the catalyst for the Arab Spring.
So much has happened in the world since, it is all too easy to forget that the first Arab Spring began as a series of anti-government protests, uprisings and armed rebellions that spread across much of north Africa and the Middle East.
The dictatorship in Tunisia was overthrown. Governments fell, too, in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Iraq, leading each to brutal civil wars. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak was spectacularly deposed.
The role of social media in each of these uprisings was undeniable, especially in the early days, when activists used Facebook and Twitter to broadcast to the wider world evidence of these protests and their often-brutal consequences. Even the moniker ‘Arab Spring’ had an undeniable hashtaggable quality to it.
Just as the activists were using Facebook and Twitter to organise and amplify their demands, the social media giants seized the opportunity to brand themselves as platforms for political activism and resistance. To this day, numerous media outlets run the claim that “social media made the Arab Spring” and that it was a “Facebook revolution”.
Just as they were doing this, groups such as IS were seizing the opportunities power vacuums in the region were creating and weaponising the very same social media to spread propaganda, and recruit tens of thousands of members.
Just as it was easy for the early idealists of the Arab Spring to reach their supportive audience, IS and others only had to extend their hands and touch their screens to target a vastly increased recruiting pool, concurrently identifying extremists, while avoiding detection by respective domestic security authorities.
This contradiction best encapsulates the contradictory role of social media as a conduit for good and evil.
In the next 30 months, an estimated 2.1 billion people will vote in ‘fair and free’ elections around the world. That is about a third of the global population who will have the opportunity to vote in India, the US, the UK, the EU, and Ireland.
Elections should represent the best of what democracy has to offer, but just as the internet helped alter the world order in the Arab world over the last decade, elections offer a perfect opportunity for bad actors to infiltrate and influence outcomes of what should be impregnable institutions, with social media increasingly becoming their weapon of choice.
The 2016 US presidential election was one of the first instances that showed evidence that an external actor — in this case Russia used social media ads and bots to influence social media political conversations, spread disinformation and in crease polarisation between political groups.
This interference played a role in affecting the outcome of the US presidential election. Robots (bots) were used to disrupt and distract online users around the world, while advancing the interests of individuals, politicians, and organisations.
It’s been seven years since that election saw Donald Trump become president. Since then we have seen the internet play a similarly divisive role in the Brexit outcome, a global pandemic, and much more recently, the most violent conflict of this century.
Consider for a moment how foolish Israel (heretofore regarded as the practitioners of the most sophisticated state-sponsored public relations and propaganda machine in the world) has been exposed by both real-time footages posted on various platforms and out-thought by Hamas, which has been far more effective in its use of social media to promote its cause.
Consider too, why Elon Musk, one of the world’s wealthiest men and owner of X, formerly Twitter, recently accompanied Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Kfar Aza, one of the kibbutzim targeted by Hamas during the October 7 terror attacks.
The tech billionaire is no stranger to inserting himself into geo-political narratives, even gracing Ireland with his online presence when he took to X to say that Taoiseach Leo Varadkar must “hate the Irish people” in the wake of the riots in Dublin.
Musk’s intervention was so absurd it even had opposition parties defend Varadkar, with TD David Cullinane accusing Musk of “inciting hatred and violence among certain people”.
Whatever little credibility Musk may have had as a commentator on Irish societal issues was lost with his subsequent assertion that having Conor McGregor run for public office was “not a bad idea”.
While Musk’s musings do not represent anything other than him exercising free speech, that the owner of one of the world’s most powerful social media companies is so casually capable of interfering on issues of such domestic importance is another grave cause for concern when considering the soft and hard power such platforms have on the micro- and macro- aspects of our lives. Facebook and Meta employ more than 2,000 people in Ireland.
Google employs more than 5,000 people. To suggest these numbers do not restrict our Government’s ability to criticise them is to be naive. Musk is absurd enough of a character to stand up to and risk little in doing so. Mark Zuckerberg and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, however, are much too smart to engage in such juvenile antics, which makes them more difficult to be critical of.
The spreading of misinformation to affect political outcomes is certainly nothing new. Under the nickname Lord Haw Haw, William Joyce (raised and buried, incidentally, in Galway), was recruited by Joseph Goebbels’ Reich Ministry of Propaganda and given his own radio show, Germany Calling.
Goebbels needed foreign fascists to spread Nazi propaganda to Allied countries, especially Britain and America, and Joyce was the ideal candidate. At the war’s conclusion he found himself at the end of a hangman’s rope, convicted of high treason.
The major difference between this and then, however, is what Joyce achieved in six years of broadcasts during the Second World War, could be achieved during just a series of social media posts, today.
See also the January 6 Storming of the Capital. Why have a slow burn when you can set alight a prepared bonfire? There is another insidious element to social media and the curation of content that must undoubtedly be having a negative effect on all of us, and that is exposure to distressing content.
This was a problem long before the horrors of the conflict in Gaza were beamed straight to our phones, but our reluctant submission to such gruesome visuals (undoubtedly driven by a desire to understand what is happening) must be taking its toll.
I am anecdotally aware of friends working for media organisations who suddenly find themselves as unqualified content moderators, charged with sifting through the never-ending morass of distressing material in vain attempt to verify what is real, and what is not.
Considering how distressed one exposure of this makes me a day, I dread to think of how detrimental this is for anyone to do as part of their job.
Where would those same people be (the stranded citizens of besieged Gaza) without their phones, and their ability to upload evidence of otherwise ignored potential war crimes? To tweet cries for help from under the rubble. To post videos of incoming rockets and slain children, if only to catch and hold our attention?
The bottom line regarding social media is algorithms are not neutral. They encode political choices, influencing the information seen by us all, the users.
When we open our social media account, we are met by algorithm-filtered and recommended content, based on prior activities and interactions on the platform.
Yes, it enables greater free speech and can inspire overdue revolution, but it also fertilises the dark recesses of our souls where dormant demons lie.
The more we enslave ourselves to it, the more susceptible we are to its corruption.
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