Social Media and Privacy

Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
from magic”. In other words, advancement in technology is like magic, when people have little
or no knowledge of how it works. The rise of social media websites has made our privacy to be
more vulnerable to surveillance and commodification. This is because people upload their
personal information on social sites, allowing others to access their data (Kumari and Singh,
p.602). Sangeeta Kumari has a masters of Technology and is a lecturer at the National Institute
of Technology Raipur, while Shailendra Singh has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering
and lectures at the same institution. This source analysis privacy and security om social media,
and how people can protect themselves from intruders. While privacy and security remain the
major concern in IT applications, most users of social media are not aware of how vulnerable
their personal information has become. The film “The Social Dilemma” examines how social
networking negatively impact on people, with experts cautioning social media users about the
dangerous path that tech-companies have taken (Orlowski). Jeff Orlowski is a film director, who
has directed a number of documentaries such as Chasing Coral and Chasing Ice beside the film
The Social Dilemma. Based on the analysis of the experts, something needs to be done now; else
technology will overwhelm human strength leading to such negative effects as internet addiction,
polarization, and radicalization. Hence, lawmakers should intervene in order to protect the
privacy of Americans more.

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Social media companies have devised illegal methods of infringing on peoples’ privacy
and continue to enjoy their freedom. For a start, technology is advancing at a very high rate, and
the legal system has not been able to enact laws to deal with such drastic changes. For instance,
since the 1960s, digital processing power has gone up 1 trillion times, which is the highest
compared to any other industry in the world. Even with smart cars and bullet trains, no industry
has been able to achieve even close to half of such tremendous growth in the last five decades.
For this reason, there are no sufficient laws to deal with the changes, and this makes social media
companies to hind behind the existing laws and infringe on people’s privacy.
Social media companies have a unique business model, which is distinct from other
industries. Their model is based on getting people’s attention, keeping them engaged, and
monetizing by selling what they know about you to advertisers. According to the film, social
media companies trade on human futures by building models that predict people’s actions. Their
business model has three objectives which are engagement, growth, and advertisement. In terms
of engagement, they use algorithms to keep their users hooked into social sites, and keep on
scrolling in order to find new contents. In regard to growth, the models lure people to invite more
of their friend, leading to a large pool of people that watch or follow specific content. Lastly,
they make money by advertising on behalf of other companies (Orlowski). The problem with this
model is that it is based on manipulation. This is because these companies observe, track,
measure, carefully monitor, and record everything that the users do online.
People are the product of social media companies, with advertisers paying them in
exchange for showing their adverts to us, while the advertising companies are the customers.
There is nothing wrong in profiling the target customers while devising advertising campaigns.
The problem is the tech companies not only use peoples’ personal data but also manipulate them

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towards watching or liking certain things. The commoditization of human beings is morally and
ethically wrong, but currently, there is limited legal framework prohibiting social media
companies from using people as products. Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist of Google,
argues that if one is not paying for the product, they that person is the product. Ironically, only
the drug industry and social media companies term their clients as users (Orlowski).
Like drugs, no one realizes when he or she becomes hooked up, ending up addicted to
social media. Social media companies use positive reemitted reinforcement, which is mostly
used in dogs and other animals to teach them new behaviors. This operant conditioning entails
adding a reinforcing stimulus after an animal behaves in a certain manner, and that behavior is
likely to be repeated. Social media companies use positive reemitted reinforcement, whereby
users are programmed in such a way that once they refresh their social media sites, a new thing
appears on top. People become anxious to look at social media because they do not know
whether they will get a notification, or when they will get one. Simply put, social media acts like
a slot machine in a casino, keeping the players with anticipation that their next move is that one
that will yield return (Orlowski).
The need for strict regulation emanates from the fact that the use of social media is
threatening the lives and psychological wellbeing of young people. Social media has the
capability of digging deep into the brain stems of the kids, taking over their sense of self-worth
and identity. With repeated use of social media, such young people develop a perceived sense of
perfection. This explains why a majority of them use filters and other body-enhancing features to
look prettier to their peers. Unknown to them, the quest for perfection on social media only
gratifies them with fake, short-term popularity rewarded with short-term signals such as Thumb
ups. The problem with this trend is that such young people become more anxious and depressed,

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making it hard for them to take risks. Dr. Jonathan Haidt, who is a lecturer and social
psychologist from NYU Stern School of Business and an author of “The Righteous Mind: Why
Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion” analysis shows that suicide and bodily harm
among teenage girls have increased since the advent of social media (Orlowski). Between 2009
and 2015, the number of girls aged 15-19 years that were admitted to hospitals for non-fatal self-
harm raised by 62% while that of girls aged 10-14 years raised by 189%. In the same period, the
number of girls aged 15-19 years that committed suicide raised by 70% while that of girls aged
10-14 years increased by 151% (Orlowski).
A research by Forbes Magazine in 2018 revealed the need to regulate social media
companies (Arnold, para.1). Andrew Arnold is a writer and a life style entrepreneur who has
worked Fortune 500 companies such as LinkedIn and Cisco. This source as the hard question, as
to whether social media companies need to be regulated. This is because such companies offer
misinformation to people by profiling them. Everyone has a unique personality, and social media
companies use such unique traits to offer people information on what they want to hear as
opposed to the truth. Arnold illustrates how social media empowers large corporations. He
argues that “As long as they can afford to saturate social media feeds with posts that curate the
information they want, anyone standing in opposition to that is essentially steamrolled because
they do not have the resources to counter that” (Arnold, 4). Based on the documentary, these
companies are biased towards false information, largely because false information allows them
to make money. Using artificial intelligent (AI), the companies know everything about their
users, allowing them to anticipate their users’ next move. In such a case, they are able to feed
people contents based on their reality. Take, for instance, when one is searching for migration to
the United States. Different people will receive different results, depending on where they live.

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Equally, search engines will have a different definition of terms and phrases, which are
programed to suit the interest of the user. Regulating social media companies means that they are
not at liberty of profiling people; hence the information they offer to their users is standardized.
Social media companies depend on algorithms, which are not objectives because they
are built with commercial interest. This brings in the issue of machine learning, which is a
section of artificial intelligence dealing with applications designed to learn from data and
improve the accuracy of those application without performing further programming (Shwartz
and David, p.2). Shai Ben-David is a computer science professor at the Technion, which is Israel
Institute of Technology, while Shai Shalev-Shwartz is a professor at the School of Computer
Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Their book explains the
fundamentals underlying machine learning and the mathematical derivations that transform the
theoretical principles into practical algorithms. In relation to their explanation, AI looks for
patterns and features in big data, which assist them to make quick decisions and clear
predictions. While machine learning is a revolution on how data is processed, social media
companies are responsible for proving the required data to the machines. It has reached a point
that machines are controlling people, more than people are controlling the machines.
Social media plays a vital role, not only on entertaining people and keeping them
connected but also on informing them. However, social media companies have taken advantage
of the loopholes in the legal system to harvest peoples’ personal information and use such
information to manipulate them. People who use social media are susceptible to manipulation,
considering that they are often fed with content that the algorithms choose for them. With this in
mind, social media companies are able to shape how people think in terms of politics, religion,
and other social aspects, which is a threat to peoples’ autonomy. The solution to this dominance

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by social media companies lies the lawmakers, who are in a position to enact stringent measures
to protect the privacy of the American people.

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Works Cited

Arnold, Andrew. “Do We Really Need To Start Regulating Social Media?” Forbes 30 July 2018.
Web.
Kumari, Sangeeta and Shailendra Singh. “A Critical Analysis of Privacy and Security on Social
Media.” Fifth International Conference on Communication Systems and Network
Technologies 15 (2015): 602-608. Print.
Shwartz, Shai Shalev and Shai Ben David. Understanding Machine Learning: From Theory to
Algorithms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Print.
Orlowski, Jeff, director. The Social Dilemma. Netflix Originals, 2020. Film.