Last week’s US Congressional report pointing out anti-competitive practices of big technology companies – and the recent Netflix docudrama The Social Dilemma, that exposes how social media companies are subverting human minds and society – call for immediate action to rein in destructive monopolies. These big tech companies – like Facebook and Google, to name the most prominent – enjoy greater power over their users than any other commercial entity in recent history. Despite their epoch changing influence on human civilisation they are, ironically, also the least regulated.
Today’s social media hydra was just waiting for the marriage of technology evolution with psychological insights since the internet’s early days itself when people created webpages, ogled at celebrities, searched old friends and services, typed emails, scoured for pornography, peddled conspiracy theories, and frequented chatrooms. Emerging platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and WhatsApp evolved to suck users deeper into virtual cocoons. They have spawned compulsive personality traits vastly different from peoples’ original selves, fed and weaponised off the very information we search or publish. The rewards accrue to a few like social media influencers, while the repercussions of short-lived personal gratification are increasingly being felt by young people, families, communities and even governments.
Amid the gratification offered to those stirring the most eyeballs and biases, facts and reason struggle to play catch-up. Society is setting great store by hypernationalism, populism and ethnic supremacism after decades of dominance of ideas like democracy, equality and fraternity. The influence of mainstream media, which tries to distil fact from claims and present an objective reality, has also dimmed. Gen-Z has known no other world but this. An anxious, distrustful, withdrawn generation portends great chaos. Make amends before another Dark Age visits us.
Arguably, the changes happened too fast for governments to respond. But that is no longer the case. The 2018 EU General Data Protection Regulation, with norms like protecting the “vital interests of data subjects” and other individuals, offer solid templates for social media regulation. Indian regulators must apply a similar template. After all, the Supreme Court ruled privacy to be a fundamental right in India in 2017. Besides, social media is also an information broadcaster like mainstream media. Parity demands the same media regulations and responsibilities applying to both. Letting tech companies escape regulation makes a mockery of competition and media laws besides endangering individual and social well-being.
This piece appeared as an editorial opinion in the print edition of The Times of India.
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October 12, 2020 at 03:50AM
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Manipulating minds: Governments must step in and strongly regulate social media. It is a proven destabiliser - Economic Times
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