Between the 2016 Presidential Election and the subsequent investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, people have begun to understand the profound influence social media has and how easily it can be abused.
Google and Twitter have since overhauled their political advertisement policies to prevent microtargeting and dramatically limited the presence of political advertising. However, Facebook has refused to change their political advertisement policy and claims that to do would be censorship. Furthermore, they refuse to ban politicians from lying in their ads.
A common misconception people have is the idea that computer systems and software are morally neutral. This is addressed by Philip Brey in The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics. Brey refers to the embedded values approach to claim the design of computer systems have moral consequences. Computer systems and software are not morally neutral and through their development application designers are encoding embedded moral values and norms. For example, computer programs can support or be against privacy or freedom of information.
By allowing politicians to lie in Facebook ads, the social media giant is providing algorithmic infrastructures for the spread of disinformation. Facebook has a responsibility to address this issue as the current design of their platform embodies undemocratic values.
Hey Ruth, I think this is an apt commentary on the issues of the values deeply embedded into the conventional social media platforms that we are so accustomed to using. The depth of understanding the anti-democratic values for allowing lies on Facebook's platform is definitely there but I believe that you could have made that clearer from the start. Of course the preamble on regulation is necessary to break in the topic but I believe that your post could have been made much more concise and coherent by bringing up Brey's point from the start before rigorously analyzing the structural flaws behind social media and political advertisements. I think that an additional pointer that you could have brought up would be how important it is to advocate for core values that are positive such as honesty within such technological products. That would have been an alternative way for your post to have closed the loop on how the next steps forward could be planned.
ReplyDeleteThis is quite an interesting post as I did not know that Facebook was not regulating political ads and that Google and Twitter were. However, as for my understanding, Facebook claims that regulation of political ads is censorship. I'd love to hear your rebuttal to this argument. Next, I think maybe you could hook your readers more in the beginning if you spoke about the election (in regards to your topic), rather than the history of social media- as this is our current political climate, and people would be interested to read further. Thank you, and great read!
ReplyDeleteThis was an interesting read for me. I was not aware of how Facebook was handling political advertisements. I think you could strengthen your idea in this post by touching more on the 2016 presidential election of the Mueller case. You brought up this topic however, for people who may not know what happened, it would be helpful to include a link or provide some more context.
ReplyDeleteHi Ruth, I enjoyed reading your post and agree that social media has a huge influence on today's society, especially in politics. I think you could improve your introduction by trying to associate with the audience more. Maybe try to relate to them using a common social media scenario? Also, you should try to add some links. I did not know that Facebook refused to stop politicians from lying in their ads and I wanted to read more about that. One last note is you should resize your image. It extends past the right edge of the blog post margin.
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