[ Social Media Tech Companies and The Algorithms – Senate Intelligence Hearing on Fake News, Free Speech and Russia]
Facebook, Google and Twitter, the top social media technology companies, figured out that they have entangled in political controversy. According to the news article, they have testified during the Senate Intelligence Hearing on fake news, free speech and Russia. The political analyst, Antone Christianson-Galina, takes a close examination of the algorithms that influence politics through social networks.
However, in the meanwhile, the Republicans have statemented that these bid companies who have huge impact on our lives now hindered their campaigns by forbidding Marsha Blackburn’s advertisement on Twitter. Due to this political entanglement, the Hearing brought Colin Strentch, Legal Counsel of Facebook, Richard Salgado, Law Enforcement and Information Security Director of Google and General Counsel Kent Walker, and Sean Edgett, Twitter’s acting general counsel to Capitol Hill. Then during the Hearing, these three top tech industry companies, were questioned about their screening out processes.
While Colin Strentch, Legal Counsel of Facebook continued to defend oneself by saying that Facebook uses algorithms to filter out hate speeches and stop bots, one senator named Mark Warner challenged Colin by asking ‘how can they be so sure that these algorithms are not part of the problem, why can’t they see that?’. As I was reading the article, I realized that to understand how the algorithms work, I need to first know the basic network theory. With the massive amount of social media happening around us, we use those to surround ourselves with people even if we barely know each other. This is within these homogeneous groups that information cascaded occur. An information cascade is when the situation that later people’s decisions are greatly impacted by earlier people’s decisions. The structure of the social networks make information cascaded and echo chambers, which is a problem since people only see the opinions that they are likely to agree more and exposed to those one-sided opinions, losing the opportunity to see the issues with objectivity.
These algorithms may be run by computers, however it still keeps the viewers and the reader in their subjected homogenous group and cause them to stuck in their biased opinions. With this all happening, these top technology companies have been ignoring their moral responsibility among their users, therefore, need to come up with a better solution, rather than blaming algorithms with this issue, to stop users to be isolated within their subjected homogenous group of people after all.
URL: https://thepavlovictoday.com/afterimage-review/analysis-senate-intelligence-hearing-on-fake-news-free-speech-and-russia/