A Trojan horse – usually an eavesdropping kind of a computer virus, or as some of you may know the mythological wooden horse with hidden warriors inside used by the Greek to end the siege of city of Troy. I think the brilliant metaphor continues to evolve and its latest incarnation is social media! Specifically, the rampant mis-information on social media.
Don’t worry I am not asking you to give up your WhatsApp! However with great power comes great responsibility according to Voltaire or Spiderman 🙂 depending on whose philosophy you follow. I strongly believe that Social media is being used as a Trojan horse to manipulate and literally hack into the minds of billions of people. We need to do something about it. Social media is probably as profound an invention as the internet itself. However, I believe it is a huge contributor to some crises of our times. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of world-wide-web, highlights these challenges in 3 parts. First, we have lost control of our personal data (huge topic, not for now). Second, it’s too easy to spread misinformation (a.k.a. Trojan horse 3.0) and third, political advertising needs transparency and understanding. In this blog post, I share my perspectives.
- People are the biggest subjects of mass internet adoption & social media
The first apparent signs were seen in Arab spring. People used social to rally public opinion and an uprising. We began to see fundamental impact in Tunisia and other places. Fast forward to today – Brexit is a reality, despite our utter disbelief. Donald Trump got elected on a super controversial and rather ingenious campaign. Most people are still gobsmacked by these results. These movements have been enabled by social media. Can anyone predict what are the long-term consequences of these events? One thing is certain, the reductionist narratives are succeeding far more than they used to. Savvy people who know how to manipulate social media are grabbing power. The future, to say the least looks very much on an edge. How did we let this happen?
2. Majority of people do not verify facts, and are prone to cognitive bias. We need to acknowledge this, without an excuse
Most people look at a headline online and assume it must be true. People look at an internet meme negatively associating someone with a crime, and over time, they think it must be true. We are not the most logical creatures we think we are, we are prone to errors of judgement all the time. Information bias, confirmation bias, belief bias, ambiguity bias, conjunction fallacy and more are known pitfalls of our own cognition. These make us an easy prey when we are faced with complex social decision. We favour simple looking options and complete information over complex options and incomplete information – often ignoring truth or facts in the process. Ironically, real world is often full of complex options and incomplete information. Consider Brexit. People were given simple options (In or out), and total but apparently complete mis-information i.e. we go out of EU and we get back £350m a week, we keep single market access, and we are in control of free movement – sounds awesome, right? well except it was not a fact. This red-bus photo or similar ones were distributed and seen millions of times, thanks to social media.
Reality however, turned out far more complex. We have heard ridiculous red, blue or white Brexit, hard-brexit, a “deep and special” partnership, god knows what this all means in future but people voted nonetheless!
3. There is no silver bullet to address the root cause, however we can make a good start with a transparency movement, and a sufficiently strong industry response to this phenomenon
With billions of people X times the content, it is literally impossible to police everything. I have seen algorithms and AI tasked with identifying “bad” stuff, but it is also well known that algorithms are probably even more biased than human beings and are prone to manipulation. Perhaps, a good start would be to start with a transparency movement – Google has made a good start by including a fact checker on some of its content.
At least it will act as a warning sign to not take information at the face value – others should follow suit. In fact, I believe with Google and Facebook pretty much controlling most of the products in question, there should be a strong industry response translating in explicit features such as the one describe above, online ads reminding people, awareness campaigns and TV commercials.
Ultimately though, we do not believe everything a stranger tells us in the real world, we use discretion. Why should the virtual world be an exception?!
Thanks for reading, please let me know what you think in the comments section.
Abhinandanshah.com 
