The Promotion of Negativity in Social Media Essay Example

Social media is something that has been growing over the last 10+ years. For social media settings such as Tik Tok, Facebook, and Instagram to function on the daily, they require the use of different information systems and with that comes the swaying of societal opinions. However, this is not always used for good. We can see people creating fake accounts, spreading false information, etc. yet the algorithms that social media platforms have are not taking down that information. They are also not deleting accounts that are consistently spreading false information or creating fake event pages. This can influence ethical issues in our society because of the promotion of negativity.

Social media giant Facebook is known for promoting negativity. From experience, I will open the app and within a few posts there is something negative popping up whether it be about politics, Covid-19, or a friend’s post complaining about something. From a company’s standpoint, promoting negativity is a way for them to increase engagement, which it does. Pushing negative or controversial posts to the top of your feed will make users more likely to engage in the comments. Social media engagement is “conceptualized into multiple dimensions, involving functional engagement, emotional engagement, communal engagement, and attention,” (Guo and Sun, 2020). Facebook is aware of that, so they take advantage and prioritize that negative content to hit as many of those engagement factors as possible. Facebook uses algorithms to promote posts that are going to generate that kind of engagement so we can see how it is used to formulate societal opinions. This then influences ethical issues because it pushes the negativity out there and then people engage with it causing many disagreements and fights.

One prime example of this coming into play is back during the 2016 election. There was a group of Russian trolls, known as the Internet Research Agency, that used social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, to spread misinformation and influence the election. What was interesting about this is that “overall news content shared by trolls leaned moderate to conservative, we find troll accounts on both sides of the ideological spectrum,” (Brown et al., 2020). These trolls were not just promoting the side that they were trying to sway Americans towards, they were also promoting the other side. The only reason that they would also want to promote the other side would be to create an even bigger divide than what was happening at the time. These trolls pretended to be Americans and “used targeted advertisements, intentionally falsified news articles, self-generated content, and social-media platform tools to interact with and attempt to deceive tens of millions of social-media users in the United States,” (Volchek, 2021). The fact that none of the social media sites detected these posts and attempted to put an end to it shows how much more they care about clicks and not about the information that is being presented. 

These Russian trolls were deliberately promoting division and misinformation. Since they realized that Facebook’s algorithms were aimed towards negativity, they were able to exploit it. They were able to make fake accounts that would organize groups and events based around political causes. Sometimes they would even make an event that would directly go against the other. For example, a Blue Lives Matter event arranged by the fake accounts on the same day as a Black Lives Matter event across the street. Because of the algorithm that was made to promote negativity, these conflicting events and fake accounts were finding their way to the top of user’s feeds. 

Social media platforms allowed this ethical issue to occur in our connected society. From the spreading of misinformation to the way people were interacting with each other online, it is an ethical issue that was allowed. Facebook and other social media platforms rather these ethical issues occur than change their algorithm to not promote such negative content. The content that they are promoting is already formulating strong societal opinions on topics such as politics and since they are aware of that, they should rework the algorithm. It has created an ethically wrong way to communicate with people online. People talk to each other on social media in ways that they would never face to face, and they are even getting into real-life altercations because of divisions online. People are going to events to support what they believe in while there are others on the other side of the street are at an event for the complete opposite. It almost shows that these social media giants are okay with this happening. Instead, they could change their algorithm to flag certain events and topics as well as not pushing the negative and controversial content to the top of the feed. The algorithm should be able to catch if there are two events across the street from each other, created by some guy in Russia, and for both extreme ends of the spectrum. This would create a sense of care and that they at least do not want these ethical issues to be happening in the real world.