Online Social Networks. The sore in the side of the 21st century that fast grew from a benign contemporary phenomenon to an ever-mutating epidemic, the symptoms of which mercilessly strip us of conscious independent thought without our realising. Dubbed a “double-edged sword” by various investigators who share a similar curiosity about their ill-effects, OSNs are a fatal harmony of certified fact and fake news disastrous enough to corrupt elections and powerful enough to manipulate our perspectives and judgements.
The double-edged nature of this weapon, you’d imagine, would be the issue. Rather, it is its camouflage; the grey lines and the alarming inability to discern one end of it from the other is where the problem lies. The question must therefore be posed- is unbridled free speech the source of the issue? Where is the line, does one exist, and to what extent can we believe that which we hear on social media?
President of the national Academy of Sciences in the US adopts a similar albeit more extreme standpoint in noting that “Misinformation is worse than an epidemic”, claiming “it spreads at the speed of light throughout the globe and can prove deadly when it reinforces misplaced personal bias against all trust worthy evidence.”
Misinformation is by no means a new phenomenon. We’ve all heard of the flat-earth theorists, the rumours that Elvis never really died, Apollo 69 was a propaganda stunt, the list goes on. Fake news is not new news. But the problem was never really with the fake news itself, that’s something people could interpret at their own discretion. The dilemma exists in just how accessible the internet is to the misinformed and, considering its exponential growth in the last decade, just how quickly unvetted information can disseminate and influence. Polluting our feeds and in turn our minds with false information at such a rate, it is fire in dry grass. According to Pew Research Centre’s analysis of the news across social media platforms, in 2020, a sobering 50% of American Adults get their news from social media while 2 years earlier, only one fifth claimed to get their news by this means. Such a statistic does compel one to question the dark sides of free speech in this most recent generation. Reported in a study about the spread of online news on Twitter, the spread of online news is six times faster than truthful content and 70% of users could not distinguish real from fake news. There was a time that this liberty could go unchecked, but freedom of expression is fast becoming one that is grossly abused. A vessel for anarchy, it may be time to monitor what has now become too easy to falsify. MIT technology review found in 2022 that most individuals in mature economies with access to social media will consume more false than valid information. A rapid decline in accurate information, by mere implication, sets in motion a rapid decline in integrity and indeed places large question marks over humanity’s intelligence as we know it.
While the existence of AI does more antagonising in the face of such an epidemic than anything else, techniques like ‘machine learning’ detection systems and means of filtration are essential if we are to preserve the integrity of the information we consume. Without it, the problem will only intensify until society homogenises, and this epidemic will win, leaving a sea of simple-minded mono syllabics in its wake with independent thought and authenticity a distant memory or worse again, a myth. In my opinion, that’s worse than any ban on free speech-in its own insidious way, it still places a figurative muzzle over society. Less so over our mouths maybe, but more so over our minds, the factory of thought and the source of the speech in the first place.
Cambridge Online Dictionary defines deception as “the act of hiding the truth, especially to get an advantage”. 4 In order to deceive as Cambridge Dictionary defines it, people must believe what they’re being told. OSN’s and those that engage negatively with them are the villain in this story. They have become a medium through which free speech is exploited and a means by which a spectrum of individuals; from political leaders to simply misinformed global citizens cast a numbing agent over our minds and eyes until all we see is a thread of words on our feed, one more false than the next. While there indeed exists a solution in early detection of misinformation via AI as previously mentioned, this is a challenging ask because of the highly dynamic nature of big social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter (Now X). The root cause of this problem is one that must be afforded more airtime- that people have manipulated the meaning of free speech- using this qualified right as one to bend and twist in their favour as a means of deception, saying what they wish free from any means of censorship. With this considered, how free should speech, a slowly rotting liberty, really be? And should a bigger price be put on a commodity now in fats decline?
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