The Senate vs. Social Media
Analysis – Senate Intelligence Hearing on Fake News, Free Speech and Russia
Representatives for Facebook, Twitter, and Google faced questioning from the Senate as the problem of international interference regarding political elections have crept into our favorite social media sites. Democratic senators are not happy with the fact that these companies allowed the Russian government to purchase ads to influence our presidential election. There has been talk of an “Honest Ads Act”, which would force social media companies to make political ads publicly available. On the other hand, republican senators argued these companies are repressing right-wing view, with Senator Cruz arguing that Twitter banned a campaign launch video because of the political views. Some of the main issues that were brought up were how to screen out hate speech without infringing free speech. The answer, more times than not, were algorithms. These companies rely on their algorithms to do the hard work for them, like filtering out the hate speech and stopping bots. It is their sole priority and they like to contribute a lot of the company’s success to the efficiency of these algorithms. However, Senator Mark Warner brought up a different point, asking if these algorithms are causing the problems we are trying to avoid.
The article uses information cascades to explain how successful social media is at quickly taking over and spreading to different populations. It talks about how it occurs when people make decisions one after another, rather than all the time. Comparing this to how Facebook works, Facebook’s engineers manage people’s newsfeeds in a way so that voters see things they like, which will cause them to stay longer, the overall goal. So if a voter is likely a Democrat, their feed will show posts by friends relating to views of a Democrat, and repress views that might clash. By only showing views that voters agree with, they are sheltered by new ideas. The article talks about being trapped in an echo chamber, meaning that only similar opinions are revealed to the user and the user is not exposed to outside, differencing views.