The Lack of Ethical and Regulatory Guidelines Across Social Media: What Responsibility Do Platforms Hold?
Social media ethics have become a popular debate topic. Specifically, in this era of digital transformation and social division, a question has emerged: What responsibility to social platforms have to protect users against misinformation, hate speech, harassment, and other damaging content. Of course, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects web hosts from legal liability for content published by third party users, but was enacted in the 1996, long before our society was so entrenched in the digital space. We have now witnessed how social media content can impact public health, political landscapes, and social conflict. The idea of fake news is not a new concept, but its rise to popularity in 2016 can, in part, be attributed to our ability to spread information quickly through the Internet and social media. Thus the question of a host platform's role in mitigating the spread of false information becomes more pertinent in this digital age.
In a recent Forbes article, Casey Fiesler—an authority on social media and tech ethics, and the Lab Director of the research group Internet Rules Lab—explains how the rapid development of social media platforms' purposes necessitate the need to reexamine their ethical responsibility, "as tech business grows, so does its responsibility to engage in ethical speculation. 'At some point for Facebook,' says Casey, 'the way things could go should've been clear.' Rather than overlooking ethics, it eventually becomes a leader's duty to anticipate, plan, and take action on potential problems. And with examples of poor tech ethics all around us, startups have no excuse to put them off while awaiting a certain level of success" (Dube, 2021, para 9 – 10).
However, this all-encompassing approach to "fixing" the fake news problem could lead to further social division as attempts to mitigate the spread of false information "could drive certain groups further into their own echo chambers, seeking respite from partisan attacks from 'the mainstream media' or some other oppositional group ... What emerges from a nuanced look at the consequentialist ethical aspects of fake news is the worry that 'solving' this democratic problem through technical means we may be creating new problems for our democracy. If the aim of an adequately informed citizenry is to deliberate together, then the solutions that weaponize the 'fake news' label and drive individuals away from efforts of media literacy and fact checking would be a non-desirable consequence" (Stroud, 2019, p. 183). The divided social landscape that the U.S. currently faces does not diminish the need for social media ethical and regulatory guidelines, but necessitates a cautious approach to achieving them:
"While fostering the innovation of new technologies is indeed a noble objective, the reality—especially with respect to social media companies—has become far more complex and, in fact, has resulted in many unintended yet foreseeable consequences. Facebook, Twitter, Google and others have had to confront the challenge providing billions of users, sometimes anonymous or artificial, instant global reach on their platforms while balancing the risk of criminality, misinformation and other dangers that occur in real time. There are no simple answers. From a legal perspective, social media companies have to walk an extremely narrow wire. Users of social media find it a popular way to informally connect, comment and communicate without the formality of the written or spoken word. Unfortunately, social media companies have struggled with the reality that virtual or online conduct can have real-world consequences." (Lonstein, 2019, para 4 – 6).
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