When social media users are malicious

Social media is a powerful, free tool available to the public. There seems to be a new platform surfacing daily in addition to the more widely used tools like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok and Snapchat.

While social media has many benefits like informing citizens about natural disasters (e.g., wildfires, earthquakes, tornadoes) and missing person notifications (e.g., amber alerts, silver alerts, CLEAR alerts), it also has the extraordinary power to divide and accelerate violence and conflict.

Worldwide there are 4.48 billion people using social media. There is no training provided about how to use social media, how to recognize misinformation, propaganda, disinformation or extremism. Given that social media is free to use by anyone anonymously, know that anyone with malicious intent can create a fake profile and negatively escalate a user’s experience or worse.

Misinformation, disinformation

Research shows that social media is used to spread misinformation and disinformation. The City University of New York’s CSI Library defines misinformation as the sharing of inaccurate and misleading information in an unintentional way. Whereas disinformation is the deliberate dissemination of false or inaccurate information in order to discredit a person or organization. The difference between these two terms is intent.

Unfortunately, there is no indication that the spread of misinformation or disinformation will decline. It will likely get worse. The current conflict between Russia and Ukraine is an example of how quickly misinformation (unauthenticated images, video footage) spreads.

The right thing to do is not to engage in the spread of misinformation or disinformation. If you accidently post or share something that turned out to be false, the best thing to do is to delete the post (no matter how many likes or shares it received).

Genocide

It is difficult to digest that a social media platform has been used in the most violent imaginable way: Genocide. The United Nations references Article II of the Genocide Convention for its definition of genocide.

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• Killing members of the group;

• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

• Elements of the crime.”

The recent Myanmar genocide is a horrifyingly tragic example about how a social media platform, Facebook, was used to deliver hate speech and propaganda. This article, “Rohingya refugees sue Facebook for $150 billion, alleging it helped perpetuate genocide in Myanmar,” in the Washington Post provides additional detail about the case.

Because of the algorithms social media companies use, a user will continue to see content related to their previous engagements, interests or predispositions. This comprehensive article by Nadeem Hakim in the Chicago Journal of International Law (University of Chicago Law School) explains how social media companies could be complicit in incitement to genocide.

“Like print newspapers and radio broadcasts, social media provides inciters with a platform to disseminate their messages. Social media may actually enhance the inciter’s capacity to dehumanize a protected group. Unlike conventional media, it deploys algorithms with a tendency to amplify content tailored to individual predispositions, whatever they may be. Such algorithms may contribute to the exacerbation of existing social tensions within a nation. In extreme cases, this could result in the dehumanization of a protected group and therefore help set the social conditions necessary for genocide.”

Proceed with caution

Social media is not a public space. Fake accounts are frequently created. Malicious users spread misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, extremism and incite violence intentionally. Good-natured users may unintentionally spread and support these things through likes, comments and shares. While some social media companies are getting better at identifying hate speech, there are very few, if any, red flags, or alerts that appear that identify comments or posts as misinformation. Code words are often used among extremist groups or during conflict that would be undetectable to an outsider or the 4.48 billion worldwide users.

Use caution while on social media. Understand that unless it is coming from a credible source, it could be false. Don’t enable bad behavior. Report hate speech. Report disinformation or misinformation.

Use social media with honesty and integrity. Identify when social media is causing unnecessary stress and walk away from it for an hour, a day or longer.

Two books that I have recently read have chapters that go into additional detail about how social media has been used as an accelerant to violence and conflict. You can find them in my reading list: Spreading Hate: The Global Rise of White Power Terrorism by Daniel Byman and How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them by Barbara F. Walter. Barbara F. Walter.