There are countless pros and cons to social media networks. While watching “The Facebook Dilemma” I couldn’t help but put them together to try and ultimately decide whether social media is inherently a good or a bad thing. However, I ran into an issue, that being, social media isn’t inherently good or bad, it is only as good or bad as the people using it and the company regulating it. When it comes to a platform like Facebook some objectively good and some objectively bad things have come out of it, but where does Facebook’s impact lie on a spectrum of good or bad?
Firstly, Facebook accomplished its goal to use technology to connect the world. This has been used to do incredible things, such as uniting people for a common goal, like we saw in Arab Spring where many people in places like Tunisia and Egypt used Facebook as a tool to organize massive protests, which shockingly worked. They achieved their political goal and the president of Egypt resigned. Furthermore, it increased a sense of being connected by allowing people to share stories, statuses, articles, memes, and more with friends and acquaintances whenever they want.
Furthermore, certain entities would take note of these positives and sway them for their agenda. After witnessing the impact Arab Spring had on the political landscape it became very clear that this tool could be used by people to fuel political change. However, with that brought forth a scary reality, the potential to misuse such a powerful tool to mobilize people with propaganda. That’s exactly what happened when Russian interests in Ukraine were peaking. Propaganda ran rampant from Russian sources operating through accounts of people who weren’t real. They began by using it to achieve their political goals in Ukraine. However, Russia pushed its interests into the home of Facebook by using the same propaganda tactics that worked for them in Ukraine, in the 2016 United States presidential election. Many debate whether or not it had an impact, but one thing is certain and that is that a powerful political tool was used to fuel the divide in the United States, and spread propaganda and misinformation.
Facebook has its interests too. Originally, higher-ups at Facebook stated repeatedly, our information wouldn’t being shared with anyone other than who we chose and that it wouldn’t be for sale, but when the investors started coming and the company’s growth started to stagnate, there was nowhere else they looked then to our information to bail them out. Ultimately, it’s for us to decide on the spectrum of good and bad where Facebook falls. These brief examples are just a few of the many positives and negatives of Facebook, and when you have a platform that large, with a user base as diverse as Facebook’s you are bound to run into people who have bad intentions and people who will want to use the platform for their interests. However, Facebook has interests too and as time passes by, their original “hands-off” approach becomes much more distant from the truth, and their control over Facebook and the things that are allowed to be said, is becoming increasingly Orwellian.
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