Question

Maximum of 1-page report

FACEBOOK is a global force counting users in the billions. There has been a lot of criticism of FB with regard to the content on it. Critics say that some content is misleading, even false, and that other content is (potentially) harmful to society. Facebook claims that the company is trying its best but the volume of content is a lot; everyday millions (if not a billion) messages are posted daily and it is not possible to monitor and pull out undesirable content. Further, many social media companies claim that they are merely platforms where users can exercise their first amendment rights of free speech.

Comment on the issue regarding FACEBOOK. Specifically, do you think content on FB should be regulated? Provide reasons for why or why not. Further, should FB be responsible for monitoring content on its platform or should a governmental agency do it (much like FCC for TV and movie content).

Answer 1

Quality of content on social media has been a contentious issue for very long now. Since facebook is one of the largest players on social media, we can assume it to be representing the whole social media industry in our following analysis.

The notable points are:

• When users say that they can exercise their first amendment rights of free speech, they are not wrong definitely
• When social media companies say that they are merely platforms and not the regulator or policemen over people's expressions, they are also right.

But, both the views cited above have to be seen in right perspective. Also, a holisting approach to the conflict is also necessary in the interest of society, which the social media companies are serving.

Taking a holistic view, we will see that even though people have a fundamental right to freedom of expression, the social media companies ('SMC') cannot rid of their responsibility of being a important player in people's life. Following points will get us closer to the conclusion:

1. SMC are not running their websites and mobile apps in charity. That is a hard financial business for them. They aim at profits through it and they target capturing bigger market share, higher valuation of their companies, bigger investments in them, larger market capitalization in stock exchanges.
2. SMC have to answerable for what they produce, what they show and what they are known for. This answerability is not alone towards the government, but also towards their stakeholders, their investors, and yes their customer - the society too.
3. Merely saying that volumes of social media posts is too high to handle, it doesn't do. When google can search the entire web data of the world and return you the expected results within a fraction of second, how come SMC say they can't handle it?
4. Social media posts being shown on the websites and mobile apps of SMC are actually the products demonstrated; isn't it so? The responsibility cannot be avoided.
5. Yes people must also restrain and be diligent about the quality of what they post. And it is also true that we can not expect SMC policing the people on social media. If we do so, we do a bigger blunder of another kind; you see. However even if SMC cannot stop people posting unfair content, they can and should of course watch the content. There must be no hinding from this.
6. Keeping a watch over social media posts, filtering them, labelling them, removing the unfair content, preventing other people accessing the unfair content, are few of the things which must have a strict regulation policy in the interest of society and country.

By now we have a fair understanding that SMC cannot simple wash their hands saying the dirt is too much to be taken care of.

Now, the question arise, who should do this regulation?

Even here the problem is same - the magnanimous volume of the social media posts. Let us have our view on the same:

1. Both government and SMC will have to play their respective roles in order to ensure that social media platforms follow a healthy standards.
2. Role of the government is to maintain the law and order in the country. If anyone posts objectionable content on the social media platforms, government must take its own course of law. Government's role must be limited to it. Today somebody said governemnt must watch FB, then one day some will say, it must also watch Instagram, tiktok, etc.. This is not what we expect for a government.
3. Role of SMC is also of great importance. On first, with the help of technology SMC must prevent people sending unfair posts.
4. SMC must evolve methods of preventing the history-sheeters (with a record of sending unfair posts) from accessing their platforms.
5. SMC must also evolve technologies of identifying and isolating the unfair content before they are made public. Actually, here is a fault. On social media, a new post is made public as soon as it is posted. There must be lag of smallest unit of time within which the SMC software will check and approve the content of that post, before it is made public. This is very much possible, even in technical terms.
6. All SMC have to be responsible for what they are doing and also for what people are doing on the platforms provided by them. There must be no shirking from it.