The Internet Is a Lie

Welcome to the Age of Misinformation. In the days leading up the United Kingdom’s 2016 vote on Brexit, it became increasingly clear to British authorities that a foreign national had interfered with the referendum through a tactical social media attack. The foreign national, using social media data gathered from a third party statistics company, had spread misinformation about the vote using automated social media accounts (bots). The foreign country wanted to advance its own interest by dividing the United Kingdom amongst political lines while also advancing policies that softened British policy towards the foreign actor. If this at all sounds familiar, it is. The same thing happened in the 2016 United States election. The same country, Russia, perpetrated the act of interference. And yet Russia does not deserve 100% of the blame.

Let me explain. The purposeful spread of misinformation by a country to a separate, independent nation in order to sow discord is wrong. Trying to influence the outcome of independent, foreign elections in order to further the interests of your own country is wrong. Any country that participates in these acts are in the wrong. In 2016, Russia committed an act of aggression against the United States and the United Kingdom—they are not innocent and what Putin and his regime did is wrong. But 2016 should be a humongous red flag for everybody in the world and no one seems to be taking it seriously.

Let’s first start with social media. Three companies control nearly all of the news that most people get from the world. 43% of adults in the United States say they primarily get their news from Facebook. 21% say the same for YouTube. 12% get most of their news from Twitter. Three companies provide 76% of adults with their primary source of news in the United States. Problems arise from this in a variety of different ways. In the late-2000’s, Facebook and Twitter began toying with their algorithms. They realized that if feeds lined up with individual user’s beliefs, those users would spend more time on the platform. Mindless scrolling is easier if one can simply like a post and move on. Things get much more difficult if critical thinking needs to be involved. Because of this algorithmic shift, feeds became echo chambers, places where everyone could simply preach to the choir and receive the praise that social media promises. On the surface level, this shouldn’t be a problem. If I really like grilled cheese sandwiches and Twitter decided to only promote grilled cheese and not BLT’s, that’s great. I could live in my grilled cheese world and never have to worry about BLT’s. But social media became something bigger, something more dangerous. Instead of remaining virtual, it expanded into real life.

Instead of talking about which sandwich is superior, people began discussing politics, religion, migration patterns. These algorithms developed by social media companies worked too well causing people to believe that their worldview was the only correct view. On the rare occasion where one would see a Tweet or Post from the “other side,” it was swiftly “owned” by one’s own worldview. These manufactured echo chambers allowed people to disregard other worldviews because, simply put, they never encountered those views.

At this point, things were looking bleak, but not unusual. Politically slanted media sites in the United States have existed almost since the birth of the nation. It’s not even unusual for a foreign national to try and use a media site to control a story. But 2016 was different. 2016 was the year a foreign national used a site to control the masses and through the masses, control the media.

As I mentioned earlier, Russia should be held accountable for what they did in 2016 (and are probably doing now). But they aren’t the only party that should shoulder the blame. Social media should be the second biggest domino to fall. The irresponsibility through which they collected and distributed user data can directly be tied to foreign interference. The bigger issue is the carelessness that the organizations took when developing the very echo-chambers that allowed people to fashion their worldview around. While election interference is a serious breach of democracy, these curated, algorithmic feeds are the same places that people, such as the Christchurch or the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooter developed their radical views. Without recognizing their culpability in the matter, social media companies should continue to be scrutinized by the mass public.

Which brings us to the third party that should be held responsible—the mass public. We have allowed our own biases to completely shape the view we hold of the world. Instead of being responsible digesters of news, we have allowed ease of mind and fragile beliefs to curate a safe, happy online experience that hardly challenges us or forces us to think. Instead of questioning everything, we have allowed companies to spoon feed us information and swallowed it whole like a child having to take medicine. And I have some really bad news—things are about to get a lot worse.

In recent years, facial recognition technology has gotten progressively better allowing for the rise of “deep fakes” which, simply put, are photoshopped videos. These videos have already caused a widespread concern amongst celebrities as fake celebrity sex videos have surfaced in the dark places of the web. This is clearly an invasion of their privacy and is wrong on so many different levels, yet it also is a dark warning about things to come. If a foreign national was able to use fake news articles to influence the outcome of an election, what will happen when they can disseminate lifelike fake videos?

Reality is shifting. The golden age of the Internet is far behind us. We have been in the era of Misinformation for many years, yet we are only now realizing it. If social media fails to evolve and we, as the masses, fail to adapt our ability to intake media, things will only get worse.