How Do You Like Us Now?

Misinformation and hate have soured our great social media dream

- Shreevatsa Nevatia

IN 2010, MARK ZUCKERBERG beat the likes of Julian Assange and Hamid Karzai to become Time magazine’s Person of the Year. At the time, Facebook was six, and Zuckerberg, 26, both young enough to be cute. We asked Zuckerberg innocent questions then: Does social media impact reality or does it reflect it? Can we become ‘addicted’ to Facebook? Will social media make us asocial? Today, however, Mark Zuckerberg is being forced to answer questions less innocuous. Did Facebook help Donald Trump game the 2016 presidential election? Is our data safe with him? What has he done to curb online hate?

At the point of their inception, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram heralded a new optimism. If all of us were using the same apps on similar smartphones, surely the world would flatten. Our religious, political and cultural differences would betray themselves as constructs, and we’d learn how to live in a brave, new world, one where we ‘liked’ more, shared much and hated less.

Sadly, this dream has soured over time. In 2014, we chuckled when Barack Obama took the Ice Bucket Challenge, but only a few years later, our concerns had darkened. We were now worried about the Blue Whale Challenge, a social networking game that goaded participants to self-harm, persuading them to commit suicide. The Arab Spring, in 2012, made us believe that social media could help spread democracy in the world, but by 2018, we had proof that Facebook was actively undermining it instead.