The easy weaponization of social media: why profit has trumped security for U.S. companies

Abstract

American-based social media companies have become active players in digital war, both by accident of design and a subsequent failure to address the threat due to concerns over profits. Discussions about the negative role of social media in society generally address the myriad problems wrought by social media, including electoral manipulation, foreign disinformation, trolling, and deepfakes, as unfortunate side effects of a democratizing technology. This article argues that the design of social media fosters information warfare. With its current composition and lack of regulation, social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are active agents of disinformation, their destructive force in society outweighing their contributions to democracy. While this is not by deliberate design, the twin forces of capitalism and a lack of regulation of the world's largest social media platforms have led to a situation in which social media are a key component of information war around the globe. This means that scholarly discussions should shift away from questions of ethics or actions (or lack thereof) on the part of social media companies to a frank focus on the security risk posed to democracy by social media.

The hidden hierarchy of far-right digital guerrilla warfare

“…This narrow understanding generally accompanies simple solutions for such socio-political problems, which are then reduced to: (1) educating users to behave appropriately on social media, and (2) regulating and reforming platforms and their business model toward including more "ethical" algorithms, aligned with "for good" corporate policies. These and other related solutions might be useful tools to change particular traits of social media (Oates 2020), but here we argue they fall short of solving the structural problems that are the root of those observable phenomena.…”

Hacking Culture Not Code: How American Racism Fuels Russia's Century-Long Memetic Disinformation Campaign

“…To understand how the Internet Research Agency aimed to influence Black Americans, we downloaded a publicly available dataset of 3,519 Facebook ads released by the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, 2018). Each advertisement contained metadata such as the intended Facebook users targeted, and the date published.…”

“…Social platforms such as Facebook privilege the sharing of videos, images, and text that will optimize user engagement in the form of likes, reactions, shares, and comments (Turow & Couldry, 2018;Vasudevan, 2020). Ultimately, this economy of affect is commodified by backend algorithms for the purpose of selling microtargeted audience information to advertisers and developers (Oates, 2020;Walker et al, 2019). The mediating factor between audiences and advertisers is what Bakir and McStay (2018) described as (p. 171) "empathic media," which is designed to trigger an emotional response from audiences and compel them to engage with content by sharing or reacting.…”

“…In the years since the 2016 election, several scholars have concluded that Facebook's business model was easily exploited for the spread of misinformation and disinformation (Mihailidis & Viotty, 2017;Oates, 2020;Sano-Franchini, 2018;Vaidhyanathan, 2018;Walker et al, 2019). Facebook's visual design draws attention away from the sources of information, making it difficult to determine between advertising, original reporting, and propaganda (Oates, 2017;Sano-Franchini, 2018).…”

The U.S.-China Technological War

“…But can we say that modern digital solutions and, especially, such technologies as 5G, artificial intelligence or quantum systems form some new dimension of international political and geopolitical processes? many authors point to a new level of challenges and threats, and some even claim that due to the information manipulations and other capabilities digital corporations are transformed into new instruments of power projection, while commercial digital technologies appear to be more and more weaponized (Dorfman, 2020;Cartwright, 2020;oates, 2020).…”