The good, the bad and the ugly of social media

Soon after Barack Obama was elected for the second time, I remember looking at some of those “on the road” behind the scenes type photographs taken by a campaign snapper documenting the journey. The details in the photos: staff with iPhones, Obama with his BlackBerry, MacBooks on tables in offices; these accessorised scenes are repeated at the highest echelons of global political power. The most powerful people in the world, with all the technology available to them, have the same phone and laptops as us. It is really quite mad, a contemporary technology version of the “Stars – They’re Just Like Us!” features in American tabloid magazines.

They may stay in hotels we can never afford, or wear clothes we could never buy, or date people we could never get near, but we pretty much all use the same personal technology.

The same goes for social media. It must be an incredible feeling for the young billionaires who head up Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube to see their platforms being used by famous actors and singers and politicians and authors.

At the start of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, social media played a role not only as an alternative media through which civilians could simultaneously get information from and put information out, but also as a force that along with several other forces helped galvanise protest.

In YouTube's official Rewind video for 2011 – a sort of YouTube Reeling In The Years – the first frame highlighted the uprising in Egypt, "reminding us of the power social platforms can bring to global issues". YouTube took a chunk of credit for actual revolution. I can't imagine that in the Rewind for 2014, YouTube will feature in its compilation a caption that reads: "and look what we did for Isis!"

For every positive and progressive social movement utilising social media to mobilise protesters, garner support, educate the public, and spread the good word, there is a counter-movement using the same tools. The internet is broadly seen as a progressive, libertarian force, but internet companies are never going to take credit for the bad bits.

They want the neighbourly riot cleanups in London, the It Gets Better videos from the States, the environmental petitions and the funny feminist sketches. The do not want the beheadings, the lone wolf shooters uploading their video threats before they kill, or the racist rants. That is not cool.

There is something incredibly bizarre about seeing the platforms we use every day to give out about the bus timetables and upload photos of flat whites, utilised for a violent religious crusade. It is stranger still to wonder how the estimated 500 British IS fighters would have been radicalised and recruited so quickly without social media.

Reading reports of individual young British and American jihadis, the stories share an eerie commonality. They connected with other like-minded jihadis on Facebook, where they posted increasingly radical status updates. They conversed with other jihadis on Twitter. They uploaded posing photos to show their support for jihad. They uploaded videos espousing radical views.

Leaving aside fundamentalist Islam, the motivation for people projecting an online identity across Facebook, conversing, making statements and getting into arguments on Twitter, and uploading YouTube videos of various rants, is the same for everyone. We are all broadcasters now.

People ranting on social media want to be known, want attention, want to be heard. In the past, terrorists communicated with each other over the phone or in chat rooms or even via letter writing. Do you ban telephones, keyboards, and pens? Of course not. But this isn’t about peer-to- peer communication, this is about broadcast. This is about calls to action.

The viral nature of social media broadcasts is remarkable because the spread is so rapid. People quickly adopt a behaviour through subconscious peer pressure, wanting to be “in” on what’s happening, and a desire to replicate their acted version of it.

There is an unsettling visual correlation between a video of a journalist about to be beheaded, and a cheery teenager waiting for a bucket of iced water to be dumped over them. It’s not about talking to each other, it’s about talking to everyone, and people can’t help but pass it on.

Of course the platforms aren’t the problem, but they certainly can facilitate problems, as much as they can facilitate solutions. Guns don’t kill people, people do, but people would find it harder to kill in great numbers without them.

These platforms are used by hundreds of millions of people who make billions of dollars for privately owned companies who advertise to users and harvest personal information to make that advertising more effective, so who decides what are the good bits and what are the bad bits?

What is propaganda and what is a video gone viral? What is reprehensible and what is fair comment? What gets deleted and what gets left up? What is free speech and what is hate speech? What is responsible monitoring, and what could prompt another NSA-style backlash?

The answer will always lie in changing human behaviour, but the tools that influence that behaviour also need to be examined.