Regardless of the unclear intentions of creators of various social media platforms, one thing is certain: they have transformed the means by which people connect and communicate with each other in a fundamental way. Across great distances, the masses can convey and spread thoughts and ideas, organize politically to enact significant change, and reconnect to individuals from their past whom, for whatever reason, they had lost touch with over time. Noam Cohen’s article “The Truth About Facebook’s Fake Quest to Connect the World” challenges the company’s popular assertion that its expansion efforts are purely for the growth and good of mankind. He recalls the story of a former Facebook manager, stating, “he realized that Facebook, whether intentionally or not, wasn’t giving a voice to the voiceless but was helping to establish online the same inequalities that exist offline.” I disagree with this perspective, as I don’t think the two outcomes are mutually exclusive. While it is true that Facebook harbors the potential for both internal inequality (through systemic discriminatory practices in management) and external inequality (through the advertisement of products and services for monetary gain), this does not negate the positive effects of social media on society’s ability as a whole to interface. The resulting meeting of minds and cultures in places all around the globe has made it possible to create global movements. One example of this was the #MeToo campaign, which originated in America but sparked protests in many other countries, including Spain, Sweden, France, and Israel.
In his piece “Taking the You Out of YouTube?”, Professor Henry Jenkins speculates about the future of user generated video content following Google’s acquisition of YouTube. He argues that content diversity is not guaranteed just because of user diversity, stating, “the barriers are not exclusively economic but speak to issues of cultural entitlement”. In order to mitigate abuses of power and privilege that exist within these companies and on these platforms, greater oversight is necessary. Relying on a company with concrete capitalist interests in exploiting its workers and users to self-impose restrictions and implement policy changes is not an effective solution. Instead, such as with the case of Facebook, a third party organization with no vested interests should be tasked with ensuring that users are not unfairly targeted.