Co-Author Anthony Morrell
- The Machine Stops, E.M. Forster: http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
Social media is a plague on humanity… or so Forster would have us believe. However, one is left to wonder if his horrific prediction is truly accurate, or if it is merely a fear of a different world? While social media does allow for misinformation and directed advertisements to infect the integrity of our widely-held beliefs, it also distributes information and mindsets that would otherwise be lost, restricted, or unreachable. Social media connects communities across the world and allows for a more unified humanity.
So is it our duty to restrict or to strengthen social media? We hold that unrestricted discourse is absolutely essential to a healthy society, and that removing borders and geography from our ability to make friends and transfer our knowledge is a universal good.
But it is also equally true that such pathways allow for misinformation, malicious or unintentional, that can then propagate and corrupt the discourse. This eventuality must be protected against. However, we must also be sure that our interference does not overreach its bounds and cause more harm than good. In the case of doing too little, we risk an environment that strengthens or even encourages discrimination, prejudice, and other socially destructive behavior. In the case of doing too much, we instead create an information dystopia where, as in Orwell’s 1984, people’s expressions and thoughts are under extreme control.
However, the process of regulation itself promotes corruption and misuse by the regulating party, and it often comes down to extreme specifics in the rules in order to protect against malicious activity. In the social media site Reddit, a community is required to follow the global rules, which include a clause condemning threats, harassment, bullying, and inciting violence.
However, many communities have discovered that by eventually deleting posts that break these rules, those posts are allowed to have existed for some small moment in time. Thus, the community expresses itself, spreads its abhorrent ideals, and then removes them before they can be deemed ‘liable’. Worse, giving a community’s moderators such leverage also allows them to delete dissenting opinions and views, steering discussion and leading to an echo chamber where no one with a dissenting opinion is able to argue their point because they are removed from the record.
What seems clear from this specific example is that it is necessary for the computer science community to always maintain an accurate record, and enforce rules based on the actions of users without allowing moderators to silently edit the record. But specific quirks of the rules such as these are only found after extreme trial and error, and seeing the results of our attempted solutions to previous issues. Social engineering is ethically and mechanically complex, and must be handled with extreme care.