Daily Times

It is no surprise at all that research conducted by psychologists from the University of Cambridge and New York University has found overwhelming evidence that hate-material, especially when directed at political opponents, sells like hot cakes on social media. And social media giants, like Facebook and Twitter that conduct extensive in-house research directed towards increasing their profits, are well aware of this phenomenon and use it to their advantage. They even site one of Facebook’s own rather instructive studies to back their claim; were researchers commissioned by the social media giant in 2018 found that its “algorithms exploit the human brain’s attractiveness to divisiveness.” The Wall Street Journal subsequently reported that Facebook executives promptly shut down the research project and declined to implement any of its recommendations.

There is nothing wrong per se with the argument that people, whether individually or as parts of groups, only exhibit their natural tendencies when they like and share posts that are often drenched in negativity. Or that social media platforms, which are for-profit companies at the end of the day, do something inherently illegal by encouraging such behaviour only for the reason that it makes them more money. Yet there are always societal and moral compulsions to be considered when you operate on such a large scale and when your outreach can empower or delegitimise people, groups or even entire societies in the matter of a few clicks. And it says something about the internet as a whole because in a matter of only a few years it has descended from being the revolutionary “information super-highway” that everybody took it for to becoming the most convenient platform for spewing venom on whomever one likes.

It is because of such tendencies that governments like India have begun taking things into their own hands and started to clip the wings, so to speak, of some of the most penetrating social media outlets. Twitter, for example, has had to fall in line and comply with the directives of New Delhi after the latter, stung by how activists were able to leverage the former during the farmers’ protests a few months ago, decided to put curbs on its operations within that particular country. India’s new IT rules are aimed at regulating content on social media and forcing firms to act quickly on legal requests to remove controversial posts and share details about the people posting objectionable messages. No doubt such actions infringe upon the sanctity of concepts like freedom of expression, but it is also true that governments are now facing obstacles like never before when it comes to regulating free speech. And it’s quite a shame that social media, which was meant to liberate all of the human expression, is responsible for much of it. *