Role of Social Media

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  • Social Media and Social Networks in actual terms differ as
  • Social Media is a communication channel that transmits information to a wide audience and is usually a one-way street (One to Many).
  • While Social Networks facilitate the act of engagement between likeminded people, groups or communities. (Group of people come together).
    • Participation: Social media encourages contributions and feedback from everyone who is interested. It blurs the line between media and audience.
    • Openness: Most social media services are open to feedback and participation. They encourage voting, comments and the sharing of information.
    • Conversation: Whereas traditional media is about “broadcast” (content transmitted or distributed to an audience) social media is better seen as a two-way conversation.
    • Community: Social media allows communities to form quickly and communicate effectively, sharing common interests.
    • Connectedness: Most kinds of social media thrive on their connectedness, making use of links to other sites, resources and people.
Types of Social Media
  • Social networks: These sites allow people to build personal web pages and then connect with friends to share content and communication. The biggest social networks are My Space, Facebook.
  • Blogs: a blog is an online journal where the entries are written in a personal, conversational style. Thy are usually the work of an identified author or group of authors.
  • Wikis: These websites allow people to add content to or edit the information on them, acting as a community document or database. Example- Wikipedia.
  • Forums: Areas for online discussion, often around specific topics and interests. Each discussion in a forum is known as a ‘thread’, and many different threads can be active simultaneously. This makes forums good places to find and engage in a variety of detailed discussions. Reedit, Quora, Facebook.
  • One major difference between forums and blogs is that the Blogs have a clear owner, whereas a forum ‘s threads are started by its members.
  • Content communities: They organize and share particular kinds of content. Here, you have to register, you get a home page and then make connections with friends. The most popular content communities tend to form around photos Instagram for images and videos (YouTube).
  • Micro-blogging: Social networking where small amounts of content (updates) are distributed online and through the mobile phone network. Example: Twitter.
National Security & Social Media
  • Social media poses challenge for democracies because the channels such as social networks and blogs present powerful tools to spread information to the masses.
  • Few examples to remember are the recent mob lynchings due to allegation of beef consumption, Gujarat patidar agitations, Jallikattu agitations, Chennai flood, Delhi riots, Honkong protest, Myanmar Protest, Black lives matter, Storming of Capitol Hill, Tawheed Jamat & Covid 19 Propaganda.
  • Law enforcement agencies shut down the Internet to prevent the forwarding of messages and possible riots.
  • Nearly 70% of cases of internet shutdowns globally happened in India in 2020.
  • Protest let to Riots. Ex: 2016, Jat protests in Haryana and the Kashmir unrest following the death of militant leader Burhan Wani, & Thuthukudi protest → Became Riots → Gun shoot.
Terrorism
  • Social Media are more and more used by terrorist organizations as tools for ideological radicalization, recruitment, communication and training; Mobilisation of Funds.
  • The rapid expansion and development of social media can be used to cause problems by propagating certain ideologies, mobilizing and organizing people.
  • Private social media and chat tools are developed by terrorist to keep the communication intact.
Protest Movements and Revolution
  • Social Media constitute an asset of great importance both for protest movements and for revolutions. Rebels and revolutionary groups turn to such tools to better organize and spur masses to action, to arrange protest or struggle activities and manage their tactical and operational aspects.
  • It has a potential for disrupting public order, either involuntarily through the unchecked spread of rumors, or deliberately through the propagation of misinformation with the intent of creating enmity between groups.
Criminality
  • Criminal organizations use Social Media as support, communication and coordination tools to conduct their illicit activities.
  • This kind of illicit activities can be either purely information ones (i.e. spreading child pornography with fee, “virtual” identity thefts, phishing, spread of viruses, trojans, worms, etc.).
  • “traditional” ones (i.e. drug smuggling, human trafficking, money-laundering, transfer of documents from industrial espionage).
  • Mobile phone technology provides easy and instant digital camera and video facilities, and this can be used maliciously.
  • Cases of cyber bullying, misuse and corruption of personal information, the posting of material about an individual by third parties, often of a malicious nature, and publishing of material involving others, without their consent, which can be embarrassing or worse.
Threats
  • Communally, racially and ethnically radical ideas can be spread easily through social media.
  • Sharing and publishing of any propaganda has made easier without any legal restrictions.
  • Rumour mongering, instigating riots, flashing protests, disseminating false propaganda has become normal with the advent of social media.
  • Faked videos and morphed photos can be easily utilized for Societies' perception management.
  • Hate Speech – Individual or group; Cyber bullying, Online threats.
  • A short film clip which was aimed to create awareness among masses regarding child abductions was propagted as a real clip of child abduction. This led to a series of mob lynchings all over India.
  • In 2013 a Pakistani video of lynching of two youths was propaged with communal tone in India, which eventually lead to Muzaffarnagar riots.
Complexities in Managing Social Media
  • The efforts to curb the misuse of social media misuse must not affect Right to freedom of expression.
  • Anonymity of users act as a main cause of social media misuse. Hence it is difficult to take action and trace the criminal (FB – Original Name, verified user status, Blue tick).
  • Location of servers outside India, makes regulation difficult (Data localisation).
  • Clash of jurisdictions; International cooperation.
  • Difficulty in linking online content and causality of violence occurred.
  • Cyber bullying and Trolling.
  • Social media Management Rules.

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