HCGEC

Has social media been a positive or negative influence on society ?

There is one scene in The Social Network where Marc Zuckerberg’s lawyer expresses curiosity to the firm’s user base in Nigeria. The exchange goes: “They don’t have roads, but they have Facebook?” I think this line depicts vividly my relationship with TikTok, the hot-hit video-sharing App that may, someday, turn Facebook obsolete.

While at school, we are required to hand over our phones before entering the dorms, but I still manage to retrieve my “confiscated device” to take a few sneak-peeks at those TikTok content. As our dorm superintendent unravelled my chicanery, I sensed the resemblance between my dependency on TikTok and drug addicts smuggling their meds into their rehabilitation facilities, whose actions I despise wholeheartedly.

My parents’ strategy in coping with my “addiction” is to prevent it from the source with the newly introduced Adolescent Mode feature. Unlike conventional parent control where adults could directly make exact orders such as disabling certain contents for teenagers to view, this Adolescent Mode implements machine learning technology in which the algorithm makes semi-conscienc choices to determine whether certain content is appropriate to the audience. Initially, the algorithm would only ban explicitly or borderline implicitly inappropriate content, but it gradually lays its hands on wholesome puppy videos. In a matter of days, the only videos available to me are pure scenic. If David Fincher were to direct The Social Network sequel on TikTok, the line for Chinese high school students might be like: “You guys don’t have full access to all content and even your device, yet you still use TikTok?”

Social media is, undoubtedly, a manifestation of an involvingly progressive movement which gives the ownership of content and the freedom of action back to people. User-generated content flooded the public domain and detoxicated the soil where authoritarian propaganda used to flourish. However, power without supervision could lead to serious consequences. Some contents of social media with little to none rigorous fact-check process can be prone to misinformation that traditional news outlets would inherently provide. For teenagers including myself who are largely influenced by what is available to us, yet with minimal intention to validate such contents, a supervised browsing system can be an effective way to shield teenagers from unhealthy contents. However, the question remains unanswered yet critical on whether freedom of expression may be compromised if there is a pre-defined mechanism to filter out and determine the contents available to the audience, especially when such process is done by a few lines of computer code. This may potentially raise eyebrows on a global scale for issues such as net neutrality and morals of artificial intelligence.

Social media, as a product of technological advancement, is capable of great things. However, it’s our duty, particularly the young generation including myself, to steer it to the right direction. I remain optimistic to social media, but it’s not without any concerns for its distinctive problems which requires safeguard and appropriate legislature.