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The primary goal and purpose of facebook is to keep you hooked. To keep you engaged with the social media platform for as long as possible in order to expose you to the most advertising and data-collection opportunities. It is a fundamental lie that social media is a free service. We pay for it but not in the traditional sense.

However, it is not so clear cut in my opinion. Social media and facebook in particular, are not services of pure evil. They can connect individuals on opposite sides of the globe in various ways. Whether that be in acts of terror or hate or in social awareness such as the Black Lives Matter movement that has recently swept countries around the world. In this way, the service can act as both a tool of division and collaboration.

Perhaps another confusion that people seem to find is that facebook and social media are a confusing web of lies that are fed to us, that this is its primary objective which cannot change. This is simply not true. It is true that facebook wants to make you emote. The platform wants to make you angry, happy, sad, laugh, cry, etc. By propagating content that elicits such responses the platform gains insight into the human condition. It further understands what makes us tick. What will make us like, sad react or angry react. It can then target us with this content and keeps us hooked for longer, constantly improving. However, we are not all merely passive potato sacks being fed content that we just consume (although many of us use the platform in this way). We have control over what content we choose to feed ourselves. We create the algorithms that feed us the content we receive. We like, subscribe, click and read particular content and it is then re-fed back to us. So, the simplest most straight forward way to receive truthful, honest content via social media is just subscribing to honest and reliable information sources and news organisations.

The ability and skills to source reliable information is a huge ownness to put on media consumers and facebook users. Facebook has been increasingly in the spotlight for its lack of commitment to regulate fake news and hate speech starting on its platform. Whether the company sees regulation as a threat to its business model or free speech or political freedom or all three is uncertain. I do believe that stricter media regulation on hate speech and fake news is necessary and integral to ensuring we create a more well-informed society. However, I also believe that we as consumers can also be the change we wish to see in the world. We can subscribe to honest, integral information sources and news media that don’t just reaffirm our opinions but challenge them and are well sourced and credible. As we can choose our own path and values in life, so too can we do this with our algorithms and in virtual online spaces.

Where do you get your information from? Are you sure it is credible? How do you think we can be responsible well-informed media users?