(S1E1) Social media: what do we know?
- Yue
- Oct 25, 2019
- 6 min read
Social media is fun, powerful and handy but also can be scary.
How did we come this far in engaging with the advancement of media technology?
Two pieces of news caught my eye recently while I was conducting my routine breakfast time news browsing: NBA’s China crisis and the death of South Korean K-pop star Sulli. In case you are not too familiar with these two, here are some of the news coverage for your information (of course, you can always search for more).
NBA row:
Daryl Morey backtracks after Hong Kong tweet causes Chinese backlash, BBC
假如NBA事件发生在2004年, @ 假装在纽约
The death of Sulli:
Death of K-pop star Sulli prompts outpouring of grief and questions over cyber-bullying, CNN
Putting aside the completely different context of the two news events, I noticed an interesting common ground in both issues: a key actor, the media channel, the “playing ground for further development” – social media. This is where Daryl’s words were known and spread out internationally. It was his tweet that triggered the large-scale backlash in China; this is where the 25-year-old K-pop star gained more fame and, at the same time, more criticism. Facing the tragic ending of the 25-year-old celebrity, many question and blame the impact of cyber-bullying.
I handpicked an article by a well-known Chinese “We media” @假装在纽约 in the light of NBA’s China crisis, because inspiringly, it shuts down lots of other discourses and focuses on the crucial role played by social media and presents an imaginary scenario: what if the whole story took place in 2004, when there were no popular social media platforms exposed to the public. The argument is that the result could be hugely different or maybe this row would never happen to begin with. First of all, Daryl might not be able to find the place to share, to publish his opinion, no matter what that is; secondly, it would be harder for his message to reach people (potentially, social media users) to stir further discussion and development. In the end, the writer expressed his feeling of nostalgia towards the good old days when there were no social media and people from all over the world can coexist and communicate in the most original, slow-paced but natural way.
Yes, we all know social media is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it creates the easiest, fastest and economically-efficient way for people to communicate, to keep in touch with each other; on the other side, so many downsides are generated with its seemingly non-stoppable momentum: fake news, cyber-bullying, addiction, threats to privacy, mental health and so on.
I couldn’t help but wondering how did we come this far in engaging with an advancement of media technology?
To answer this question, I attempted to learn something from the history, data and literature. Firstly, how did social media come into being? By simply googling the two key words, it took me zero effort to locate a snapshot of the timeline of social media (oh, the almighty Wikipedia).
Here is the thing: social media becomes what it is thanks to the power of creating and sharing information via networks, connections and communities. This power is achieved not in one action. Instead, due to the aggregated strength of the public, the magic of social media has been gradually discovered and improved. It is only very recently, since 2004, when the most well-known platforms (such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Weibo, WeChat and so on) were launched to serve the purpose and maybe derived some unexpected outcomes.
To be more visual, I found this amazing timeline created by Dr Miriam Johnson.
Next question, what is the scope of social media now? One of the most direct ways to answer this would be to take a look at the number of users.
Over 2.9 billion users are expected in 2020 compared with fewer than 1 billion a decade ago. Undeniably, the trend is upward. The spirit is high. After years of development, social media continues to attract increasing numbers of users and attention. Some say this is a scale effect; some say its success is deeply rooted in human nature: being involved and being social. The reasons behind can be various and complex just like the approaches to understand and explain human behaviours. The fact is, numerous people and organisations benefit from this media change, just like numerous people and organisations could suffer from it.
I feel the discussion of the pros and cons of social media can go on forever. Out of the respect to the common practice and expectation of what a blog’s reasonable length should be (I understand that maybe many people cannot be bothered to finish a long blog reading. As a matter of fact, I am one of them), I will only highlight (please bear with me) one side effect of social media here: fake news. Mounting literature dives deeper into the origin, development, economics of fake news and its connection with social media (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017; Shu et al., 2017; Tandoc, Lim and Ling, 2018).
There are some findings and analysis worth noticing. What are the features of fake news on social media? This question can also help us to understand why there are fake news trending on social media. Shu et al. (2017, p.25) point out that first of all, “the low cost of creating social media accounts encourages malicious user accounts”. The emergence of “We media” means that everyone can be the content generator and publisher. If everyone can disseminate information, how can we define which one is trustworthy and which one is not? How can we protect ourselves from the downsides of information explosion? Accounts such as social bots, cyborg users and trolls are increasingly prevalent, which brings in malicious and fake messages based on certain particular purposes and stances (Ferrara et al., 2016; Chu et al., 2012). The daunting fact is, as also being noticed by researchers, that more and more, these types of social media users are not even real humans. Instead, they are maybe just generated by some type of algorithm. The key words here are A.I., automation (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017; Shu et al., 2017). (Potentially, this is another fascinating topic: A.I. v me. Can we survive in the upcoming era of machine learning and automation? )
The second feature of fake news on social media lies in the “Echo Chamber Effect”, which explains some psychological process going on when people face available fake news: social credibility (believe in like-minded people or other people’s endorsement), and frequency heuristic (the more and repetitive exposure to news, the more people tend to believe it) (Shu et al., 2017).
Loosely speaking, the two features explain the phenomenon of fake news from the perspectives of both content publishers and consumers. This echoes perfectly the economics of fake news, if I can be even nerdier. We have to admit that there is a market for fake news. There is a demand from users, either that is psychological utility or due to the fact that consumers cannot easily distinguish fake news from higher-quality sources. With such demand in mind, publishers would stimulate the supply, no matter what their initiative would be. The bad news is, potential social costs and externalities are inevitable in this scenario (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017; Shu et al., 2017). The costs are hard to gauge but fundamental.
Now that we have some understanding of the history, data and literature. Is it safe to say that we have better understood the media channel in the two news events mentioned at the beginning of this blog? I don’t really know. After all, it is such a broad and complex topic. Most of all, it is still evolving along with the advancement of media technology, for better or for worse.
As individuals, what should we do amid this seemingly non-stoppable media trend? For me, there are two standards to maintain in interacting with social media. Firstly, the ability of critical and independent thinking is vital now more than ever. This is the weapon that I can use, and you can use to make a distinction, evaluation and eventually the right choice among all kinds of information. When in doubt, do more research; secondly and most importantly, always be nice to people, especially people we have never met, never known, whom we just encounter by accident in the cyber world. Social media is fun, powerful and handy but also can be scary. I hope I can always keep up these two principles in my engagement: stay objective and be kind.
(This is a trial session for my very fresh blogging experience. I am still in the process of discovering the style, the form, the topic… But hey, good to get started. Thanks for reading.)
References & Credits:
Allcott, H. & Gentzkow, M. 2017. Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. Journal of economic perspectives, 31(2), pp. 211- 236.
BBC
Chu, Z. et al. 2012. Detecting automation of twitter accounts: Are you a human, bot, or cyborg?. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 9(6), pp.811- 824.
CNN
Ferrara, E. at al. 2016. The rise of social bots. Communications of the ACM, 59(7), pp.96- 104.
Johnson M. 3 June, 2019. Social Media Timeline 2019. Books are social. [online]. Available from: http://www.booksaresocial.com/social-media-timeline-2019/[Accessed 17 September 2019].
Shu, K. et al. 2017. Fake news detection on social media: A data mining perspective. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 19(1), pp. 22- 36.
Statista, 2019. Number of social network users worldwide from 2010 to 2021. [online]. New York: Statista. Available from: https://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-social-network-users/[Accessed 17 September 2019].
Tandoc Jr, E.C., Lim, Z.W. & Ling, R., 2018. Defining “fake news” A typology of scholarly definitions. Digital journalism, 6(2), pp.137- 153.
Wikipedia, 2019. Timeline of social media. [online]. Wikipedia. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_social_media[Accessed 17 September 2019].
@假装在纽约
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