Fifty Shades of Social Media

For last few years, we are witnessing a kind of social media revolution in our country that can be labelled as The Great Indian Vomiting Revolution. Now we are not ordinary people; everyone has become global content writer, philosopher, international transmitter and broadcaster. There is hurry everywhere to jump on the social media bandwagon before it’s too late. Then there are social media groups for everything. One single person is part of dozens of such groups. Family, relatives, school and college friends, office colleagues all are connected through these groups. Type of posts and content of each group is different; however, there are some similarities also.

Our normal day start with facing bombardment of lot of morning wishes, sanskari messages and posts over such groups and the creator of such chain messages threaten people to like/comment and forward such sanskar to ten more people or face serious consequences. By afternoon, sanskari messages are replaced by hatred or other fake messages which spread like forest fire that sometimes create panic among masses. Incident happened in Bengaluru few years ago is an example which created havoc among north eastern Indian and forced them to leave Bengaluru.

Tonnes of fake messages are propagating every single minute, influencing the opinion and mindset of people. God only knows, how many times our National Anthem is awarded UNESCO’S best anthem award by such fake messages! We have also seen many fake quotes, accompanied by photograph of any individual, circulating in social media, that sometimes go viral and trigger outrages. Most of the time fake news are used to malign any particular community or to create hatred among different groups. There is a potential threat for everybody who has an online presence. Fake news spreads more faster than the real news .Once the screenshot of any such fake news reaches Whatsapp, they spreads within seconds from group to group. The damage to one’s reputation and prestige is immediate and impossible to reverse.

We all are one way or another contributing towards generating of such fake messages by simply reading and forwarding them without checking their authenticity. Most of the users believe on everything they receive through Whatsapp or Facebook as if Messenger of God has himself written those messages. It seems we are heading towards a new unreal world, dominated by social media tech giants.  

Rome wasn't built in a day. Even my first advent to social media platform was more than a decade ago during my initial days in college, and that was my first exposure to virtual world. Thanks to Orkut, that was boss among various platforms available; however, Facebook & Twitter were also in their nascent stage and were slowly picking up. Connecting with strangers through such virtual pathways, writing scraps & testimonials to friends became part of day to day activities.

In all such social media platforms users are assigned space to write content like every Facebook user has a wall, but, unlike other walls that divides , such wall actually connects people. There are news feeds feeded with birthday & anniversary wishes, news items, views & opinions, videos, memes etc. Isn't it awesome to talk to your near or dear ones by messaging or calling services free of cost .Isn't it cool to upload photographs, do check-ins at all places, tag friends to annoy or please them, poke any random stranger over various social media platforms without paying a single penny, but, what looks awesome and cool has a flip side also.

There is nothing free in this world. If it's free then something is wrong .You must pay for everything one way or another .Recent incident of breach of customer personal data by Facebook to an analytical firm Cambridge Analytica is the perfect and classical example of that. Allegation against that firm is that it built the psychological profile of users from the breached Facebook data for targeted campaigning in elections.

When free services are given to you, in that case you are the commodity or product. Social media platforms mines user data, they look at user's personal preferences, interests, views, opinions and based on that set targeted advertisement specific to that user. You may be getting lot of suggestions and Ads based on your search on Google or based on your posts over social platform like Facebook, Twitter etc. Various techniques like big data analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, Predictive analytics are used to do such kind of mining and customer profiling. Well that's their business model and that's how they earn money. But the problem lies when that data is used unethically or without your consent by various Apps as seen in the recent case. By giving consent to access our personal data to such apps, we users, knowingly and un-knowingly, losing a lot to these platforms. Need of the hour is to have social media literacy among users to curtail such kind of misuse and breach of personal data.