The creators of Instagram launched their program just a few years ago as an easy way for users to share photos and videos and their friends and followers can leave likes. People liked it…a lot. Take a picture, add a filter and share it. Great fun.
However, Instagram, like other social media outlets, easily becomes a platform for hate and conspiracy theories. The New York Times this week conducted a search for the word “Jews” following the attack on the Pittsburgh synagogue and found “11,696 posts with the hashtag ‘#jewsdid911,’ claiming that Jews had orchestrated the September 11 terror attacks.”
As the Times explained, social media now reach to the far corners of the world, and while the technology connects people in ways never before possible, it also has had unintended consequences.
“Social media is emboldening people to cross the line and push the envelope on what they are willing to say to provoke and incite,” Jonathan Albright, research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism told the Times. “The problem is clearly expanding.”
Silicon Valley is struggling to keep up.
First, there is the issue of the volume of traffic. The Times reports that Facebook said “this year only 38 percent of hate speech on its site was flagged by its internal systems.” YouTube received complaints from users about nearly 10 million videos during just a three month period.
Second, what exactly crosses the line on speech? A post denying the Holocaust is clearly false, but should that be removed and who decides?
Misinformation travels fast. The Times referenced a study by M.I.T. that “found that falsehoods on Twitter were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than accurate news.”
I don’t like the term “fake news” because it is used to slam the press for any story someone does not like, but clearly there is an inordinate amount of stuff circulating on the Internet—possibly posing as news—that is simply false.
We are caught in what sociologist William Ogburn termed a “cultural lag.” That is when the culture has not caught up with the technology. It happens all the time. One example is the 9-month school calendar, which was originally designed to accommodate a rural agrarian society where children were needed to work on the farm in the summer. That time is long gone, but the culture has not changed.
The same goes for social media. The technology rapidly expanded our ability to communicate, but culturally accepted norms of how we use that technology have not yet caught up, so we end up with a high-tech Wild West where the Internet can easily be weaponized.
Hopefully, the culture will adapt and figure out ways to deal with the proliferation of misinformation and posts designed to incite violence against groups or individuals. But until then, the worst of the worst will have a global platform.