Evolution and impact of social media over the years

Social media has attained a wide range of dynamics over the years.

In various countries these dimensions have included maintaining general security and using it for civil and criminal investigation. At the same time, footage of citizen-documented police brutality and other misconduct has sometimes been posted in social media.

In the United States, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency identifies and tracks individuals through social media. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) and the United States Department of Homeland Security use social media data as influencing factors during the process of issuing visa, and monitor individuals after they have entered the country. CPB officers have also been documented performing searches of electronics and social media behaviour at the border, searching both citizens and non-citizens without first obtaining a warrant.

Many businesses also use social media for marketing, branding, advertising, communication, sales promotions, competitive analysis, recruiting, relationship management and e-commerce. Companies also use social media monitoring tools to monitor, track, and analyze conversations to aid in their marketing, sales and other programmes. Tools range from free, basic applications to subscription-based. Social media offers information on industry trends. Within the finance industry, companies use social media as a tool for analyzing market sentiment. These range from marketing financial products, market trends, and as a tool to identify insider trading. To exploit these opportunities, businesses need guidelines for use on each platform.

However, business use of social media is complicated by the fact that the business does not fully control its social media presence. Instead, it makes its case by participating in the "conversation". Business uses social media at the customer-organisational level; and an intra-organisational level.

Nevertheless, it also can play a significant role in the marketing of products. It is generally agreed that social media can encourage entrepreneurship and innovation, by highlighting successes, and by easing access to resources that might not otherwise be readily available or known. Social media marketing can help promote a product or service and establish connections with customers through brand awareness.

Social media marketing can within this matrix be divided into paid media, earned media, and owned media. Using paid social media, firms run advertising on a social media platform. Earned social media appears when firms do something that impresses stakeholders and they spontaneously upload contents about it. Owned social media is the platform markets itself by creating/promoting contents to its users.

Social media algorithms, in their commonly known form, are now 15 years old. They were born with Facebook's introduction of ranked, personalised news feeds in 2009 and have transformed over time as to how we interact online. The digital social media world appears to have become crucial in evolving the different dimensions through which we interact with others.

However, over the past few years social media has slowly turned into a challenge for both grown-ups and teenagers. For both there has come up the question of excess use minus accountability.

In 2024, governments around the world were attempting to limit the impacts of harmful contents and disinformation in social media - effects that are amplified by algorithms.

For example, we have seen how in Brazil, authorities, monitoring the situation, briefly banned X, formerly known as Twitter, until the site agreed to appoint a legal representative in the country and block a list of accounts that the authorities accused of questioning the legitimacy of the country's last election. Similarly, the EU has introduced new rules threatening to fine tech firms 6 per cent of turnover and suspend them if they fail to prevent election interference on their platforms. In the United Kingdom a new online safety law is playing a significant role. It is aimed to compel social media sites to tighten content moderation. In the United States, a projected law might lead to banning of Tik Tok, if the app is not sold by its Chinese parent company.

All these measures have led many analysts to accuse governments that they are restricting free speech and interfering with the principles of the internet as laid down in its early days.

It is important to refer here to Adam Candeub a law professor and free speech absolutist who has recently made an interesting observation-social media is "polarising, it is fractious, it is rude, it's not elevating - and a terrible way to have public discourse. However, the alternative, which I think a lot of governments are pushing for, is to make it an instrument of social and political control and I find that horrible." Professor Candeub has also referred to another dimension- he believes that, unless "there is a clear and present danger" posed by the content, "the best approach for a marketplace is ideas and openness towards different points of view".

Nevertheless, the question arises as to whether this process fails to take into account the role of algorithms?

Nicholas Barrett, technology reporter of BBC, has in this context referred to a judicial discussion where there was an argument "that ideas are based on the premise that ideas should compete with each other without government interference". It was also pointed out that "the 'value' of an idea in social media is not a reflection of how good it is, but is rather the product of the platform's algorithm."

This has raised the question about the evolution of algorithms. N. Barrett has observed that algorithms can watch our behavior and determine what millions of us see when we log on - and, for some, it is algorithms that have disrupted the free exchange of ideas possible on the internet when it was first created.

Kai Riemer and Sandra Peter, Professors at the University of Sydney Business School, have observed, "In its early days, social media did function as a kind of digital public sphere, with speech flowing freely, however, algorithms on social media platforms have fundamentally reshaped the nature of free speech, not necessarily by restricting what can be said, but by determining who gets to see what content". They have also pointed out that we need to rethink free speech in social media because - "rather than ideas competing freely on their merits, algorithms amplify or suppress the reach of messages, introducing an unprecedented form of interference in the free exchange of ideas that is often overlooked."

Facebook, one of the pioneers of recommendation algorithms in social media, with an estimated three billion users, has an interesting manner in which it creates its platform. Based on users' data 15 years ago, instead of seeing posts in a chronological order, people since then see what Facebook wants them to see. Determined by the interactions on each post, Facebook has come to prioritise posts about controversial topics, as they garner the most engagement.

Nicholas Barrett referring to such a scenario has cautioned that "contentious posts are more likely to be rewarded by algorithms and there is the possibility that the fringes of political opinion can be overrepresented in social media". Other technology analysts and many associated with the media also feel that instead of free and open public forums, social media at times offer a slanted and sensationalised mirror of public sentiment that exaggerates disharmony and stifles the views of the majority. Theo Bertram, the former vice president of public policy at TikTok, has added that "recommendation engines are not blocking contents - instead it is the community guidelines that restrict freedom of speech, according to the platform's preference. Do recommendation engines make a big difference to what we see? Yes, absolutely. But whether you succeed or fail in the market for attention is not the same thing as whether you have the freedom to speak."

Yet analysts are also now asking as to whether "free speech" is purely about the right to speak, or also about the right to be heard? Professor Arvind Narayanan of Princeton University has observed that-: "when we speak online - when we share a thought, write an essay, post a photo or video - who will hear us? The answer is determined in a large part by algorithms." This denotes that "speech is no longer organised by the speaker and the audience, but by algorithms." Such a multi-faceted approach has resulted in our era being labelled "the algorithmic society." However, it is claimed by technical experts that the way in which harmful posts are monitored also needs to change. Yet algorithms are obviously not going away.

Analyst Bertram with a US background has in this regard made an interesting observation- "the difference between the Town Square and social media is that there are several billion people in social media. There is a right to freedom of speech online but not a right for everyone to be heard equally". We all saw this dynamic taking place during the US Presidential election.

According to the US political scientist Francis Fukuyama, "neither platform self-regulation nor the forms of state regulation coming down the line" can solve "the online freedom of speech question". Instead, Fukuyama has proposed a third way- "Middleware" could offer social media users more control over what they see, with independent services providing a form of curation separate from that inbuilt on the platforms. Rather than being fed content according to the platforms' internal algorithms, "a competitive ecosystem of middleware providers could filter platform contents according to the user's individual preferences. Middleware would restore that freedom of choice to individual users, whose agency would return the internet to the kind of diverse, multiplatform system it aspired to be back in the 1990s."

Despite that, there are signs that as social media algorithms move towards maturity, their future would not be in the hands of big tech, nor politicians, but with the people. According to a recent survey by the market-research company Gartner, just 28 per cent of Americans now say that they like documenting their life in public online, down from 40% in 2020. People are instead becoming more comfortable in closed-off group chats with trusted friends and relatives; spaces with more accountability and fewer rewards for shocks and provocations.

Muhammad Zamir is a former Ambassador and an analyst specialised in foreign affairs, right to information and good governance.

[email protected]