LJ6

This week's reading mentioned social media laws and ethics, which everyone can easily relate to based on the popularity of social media platforms in the past decade, and as the number of users increases, the rules and regulations are also tightened with the intention of creating safer online environments. I find that rules and regulations on social media platforms have always been too relative, they are applied differently in different circumstances, and people with bad intentions will always try to exploit them. Thus, it makes me question the ethical factors of these social media sites, if they were designed with potential human harm in mind, then the laws and regulations surrounding them would be more complete. Even though potential human harm will always be present in any human creation including social media, technology ethics should also be made available as a guiding metric for entrepreneurs to avoid unwanted incidents in the future. For example, the recommended algorithms that are installed within those social media platforms designed to provide us with better recommendations based on digital traces that we left, are considered to be a technical ethics problem, many people don't consent to how these algorithms are exploiting data and information from its users. Therefore, I usually try to limit myself from leaving too much information online without third-party software to help delete those digital traces later.

As far as social media lies and propaganda, I feel like they exist everywhere and they are becoming more and more popular, especially with how monetizable social networks are becoming. A common feature of social network news is sensationalism, people tend to exaggerate and dramatize a common story to increase its attractiveness which in turn can bring about more fame and clout. It's such a harmful action because not only it's creating false truth for people to believe in and fall for it, but it's also forcing other authentic news sources to follow them or risk losing view counts. Nevertheless, since its nature is false, it can discredit anything from celebrities to government figures to even scientific facts, like the Flat-Earthers group and many more. Another detrimental effect of fake news and propaganda is that it creates an overload of information for readers, like the economist and psychologist Herbert A. Simon stated, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients” (Menczer & Hills, 2020). It technically forces everyone to question everything that they read online, or even conduct extensive research on their own to confirm the authenticity of the news delivered, including me, every time I come across trending stories on social media, I have to check from multiple sources to confirm its validity before I can choose to trust it.

Out of all the purposes of fake news and propaganda, I feel like political purpose has the most underestimated usage, people are usually unaware of how news can be used to persuade the public opinion, and it doesn't just stop at a country spreading false news about a different country to discredit the people. For example, how China government manipulates and tries to shape the public opinion of India through the use of multiple fake accounts, targeting their authority and international relations, (Jain, 2023) stated that "creating fake accounts or websites, using bots to amplify certain messages or create the appearance of popular support, and using social media algorithms to target specific groups with tailored content". Another manipulation of fake news and propaganda for political purposes is through social media applications, one recent example is how TikTok got banned on most Florida university campuses for security reasons, the Board of Governors member Alan Levine believed that "intellectual property and research at universities being turned over to the Chinese government", along with many different security concerns over the app (Kumar, 2023). Not just that, but there are multiple different ways in which fake news and propaganda can be deployed for political purposes, and especially with how widely used are social media networks nowadays, we might even see more delicate and settled ways of manipulating public opinions through propaganda. 

Menczer, F., & Hills, T. (2020, December 1). Information overload helps fake news spread, and social media knows it. Scientific American. Retrieved April 15, 2023, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overload-helps-fake-news-spread-and-social-media-knows-it/

Jain, K. (2023, January 7). China using fake news on social media to shape public opinion. The Sunday Guardian Live. Retrieved April 15, 2023, from https://sundayguardianlive.com/opinion/china-using-fake-news-social-media-shape-public-opinion

Kumar, D. (2023, April 6). Tiktok and other apps are now banned on most Florida University Campuses. Tampa Bay Times. Retrieved April 15, 2023, from https://www.tampabay.com/news/education/2023/04/06/uf-fsu-usf-board-of-governors/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_content=%40TB_Tmes