Social media started as a way to bring people all over the globe together. Whether it was befriending people on Facebook, sharing your picture on Instagram and Flickr or watching a video from your favorite YouTube channel. Throughout time the social media changed from being something that was entertaining to have, to being controlled by multi-million dollar corporations and others with higher power. Manipulating our way of thinking and having it become something we feel like we cannot live without. We have entered a time where we’ve become dependent to social media in order to keep up with current events, causing us to believe every post and video we encounter is real. For example, In Virginia Heffernan’s article Who Will Take Responsibility for Facebook? she writes about how Facebook admitted to accepting payment from Russia so they can post fake news in order to influence the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. “These were troll operations with a wide range of phony ads designed to fan the flames of American racism, anti-LGBT sentiment, and fervor for guns—as well as to build opposition to Clinton”. Since Facebook did not overlook content that was being posted, people were influenced to make certain decisions based off of the false information that was given. Another example is Henry Jenkins’ article Taking the You Out lf YouTube where he writes about how people reacted to Google buying YouTube and whether it was a good or bad thing. In the article, he mentions an essay written by John McMurria that explains how some people were actually upset at the founders for making a big profit out of selling YouTube since the reason it was so popular was because of everyone consistently making videos and watching other channels. “We have all seen major media companies telling us that file-sharing is bad because it takes other people’s intellectual property without just compensation. So, why are these same companies now taking their audience’s intellectual property for free?”. It goes to show that these corporations that own the social media outlets no longer care about people being interactive with one another, but they want the number of people who are using their platform in general. Noam Cohen’s article The Truth About Facebook’s Fake Quest To Connect The World supports this statement; “‘The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good,’—From the start, the case for connecting the world wasn’t based on morality, but survival.”.
Jan 31