Who Should Be Responsible for Social Media Contents?

Information is the most valuable thing in human society. Social media companies own a huge amount of information from people all over the world by running their internet platform where everyone can share their life and ideas with others.

I don’t think social media companies should be subject to regulation in the way traditional media does because it is different. Traditional media generate their own content and share it with the audience, however, social media is a decentralized platform like a big square where everyone can make voices on their own behalf. What you see on social media doesn't always stand for the platforms’ voices.

The algorithm of those big tech leads you to see hundreds of posts with similar values. Users are attracted by the content, thus, they will spend more time on the platforms and the companies could gain more money from the promoted ads. However, this kind of information collection may bring up huge influences and can also be dangerous sometimes. In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Donald J. Trump surprisingly won the election in a way people didn’t expect. By purposefully showing the advertisement to people that were carefully selected with big data, an enormous political power rose up under the influence of the social bubble and herd effect.

People can be lead and guided by information and if the information is harmful to society, then it can generate horrible results. I think it is not necessary for these companies to be responsible for what users had shared on the platform but it is necessary for these companies to manage and regulate harmful information in order to be responsible for society.

Also, it is not necessary for Big tech to be broken up. They need this strength to develop a more advanced algorithm and technology. Yet, they would need to create stricter and tougher regulations because they have much more power than other companies.