Social Media: Ever-Changing Nature

 

 

Social Media can be termed as any media which can connect us to the social sphere, so, with that definition, our beloved carrier pigeons, postcards to telegrams were our relics of social media of the past. They were slow but helped us to be connected with our near and dear ones.

With the advent of the Industrial revolution, especially the 4th Industrial revolution along with present globalization, there is compression of time and space, the speed of information has increased manyfold, and so is our interaction for the social sphere. It has not only made people global citizens but at the same time increase the reach and impact of the interactions.

Starting with Yahoo groups, Orkut, and Facebook to present age Twitter, Tiktok, and Snapchat the landscape of social interactions has taken a paradigm change and the dynamics are changing rapidly. It has given the freedom to interact with a wide range of people, from our clique of the same liking, and acts as a source of more reliable information, which comes in handy, especially during extreme situations, such as during the Nepal Earthquakes to Cyclones in Indian East Coast to operation Ganga in present Ukraine Crisis.

But with great power comes great responsibility. With such a power of influencing the social sphere, we have seen how for sole profit motives social media companies have misused this power, be it Global Analytica and its meddling with US presidential elections or allegations of suppression information related to Hunter Biden(son of current US President). The current fiasco of changing ownership of Twitter and the $8 Blue Tick controversy has led to a reduction in public trust. The problem further increases when social media entities negate the law of the land and evade responsibilities, which is evident when Twitter tried to sue Indian give on content takedown case while maintaining its own set of rules for banning Twitter accounts.

With social media comes along the anti-social elements causing issues like cyberbullying, and phenomena like cancel culture which have detrimental effects on the mental state of the individuals. Never forget that deadly games like Blue Whale and harmful viral culture like eating detergent pods are the product of the new social media regime.

Thus, many countries are bringing laws to mitigate the harmful effects. It is a global consensus now that these platforms should run with due diligence, volume and profit can't be the only criteria for governing this platform but this platform needs some government oversight. Taking a cue from this European Union has brought in Digital Service Act and the Indian Government has brought in the IT act rules 2022, both of which try to put obligations on the social media intermediaries; in the Indian case, they have to give a timeline of 72 hours for resolving the complaints and setting up the Ombudsman to faster resolutions of the complaints.

However, it is valid to point out that there needs to be a balance between the regulations and maintaining the freedom of social media entities, for any regulation mechanism there needs to be a proper definition of ethical and unethical use of social media and proper punishment should be chalked out, so, that do's and don't can be clearly marked. It should not be censored like in China and should not be given freedom such that another capital hill incident can happen, which needs a fine balance between regulation and freedom.