Hyderabad: It is not just people, even social media giants like Twitter and Facebook are realising that their platforms are not empowering but are becoming toxic. After Facebook recently launched a campaign to make sure that meaningful interactions take place, Twitter also announced that it sought help from people to measure the health of conversations on its platform. While Facebook says it will be promoting posts which allow people to talk more, Twitter doesn’t know how to address the issues of abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns and increasingly divisive echo chambers. So it is seeking the help of users to track such things by submitting proposals.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted recently that they did not fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences of the platform. But identifying the right way to measure health is only half of the problem; how to actually implement is a question to be answered, said experts. Currently, users mute those who abuse or spam or troll or are manipulators. They block people who use vulgar language. Kiran Chandra, former IT cell coordinator of the Bharatiya Janata Party, said, “We often pay no heed to people who use abusive language on our pages. People with prefix mindset are not giving constructive feedback but just come for a fall out (sic).”
The IT department of the Telangana government, which handles several profiles also tends to ignore or block people sending hate messages or abuse. Social media coordinators are asked not to retaliate in a way that will make such people feel ashamed and show the page in a bad light. But ignoring them or blocking them is not going to stop Twitter or Facebook to stop being themselves. Experts say that any measure taken by the social media giants ultimately dials down to using more of these platforms and more time being spent. Because they were built to create likeminded communities where people will stay and talk and pay full attention. Once the user’s attention is on the platform, the companies will be able to get better revenue by selling it to the advertisers.
Blame bots if you lose lot of followers on Twitter
If you have lost a lot of followers on Twitter recently, it means you had a lot of bots as followers. It is not just jobs that automation or robots are impacting; they are influencing people’s thoughts on social media. The Internet has evolved from being concerned about spam emails to issues around spam posts. A social networking bots commonly referred to as bots is like a software program that runs automated tasks on the internet. Typically, Twitter bots perform tasks like tweet, retweet, like, follow, unfollow, or send direct message to other accounts faster than human beings. In the world of social media, more number of likes or retweets signifies the person to be influential.
The success of a person on Twitter is directly proportional to the number of followers and retweets. Some bots are useful like those that tweet health tips, weather forecasts, feeds from websites and the Hyderabad Fuel Bot which goes by the id @hydfuel and tweets the Hyderabad fuel price every day. However, lately, they are being used to automatically post provoking or illogical posts just to annoy users. There are few set of internet people who are abysmal and bots are allowing them to augment their power.
Yoel Roth, a Twitter developer, noted in a blog post, “One of the most common spam violations we see is the use of multiple accounts and the Twitter developer platform to attempt to artificially amplify or inflate the prominence of certain Tweets.” Consequently, Twitter is cracking down on such bots because of which some people have seen a reduction in the number of followers. According to the new policy, ‘the use of any form of automation to post identical or substantially similar content, or to perform actions such as Likes or Retweets, across many accounts that have authorised your app is not permitted.’
Often bots tend to distort the debate in favour of, or against someone by constantly tweeting. It may be mentioned here that the government listens to social media conversations to understand the pulse of people on a particular initiative. Because of use of bots, they are not able to get the right feedback. According to a press information bureau official, “Bots and fake accounts tend to corrupt the data our software tries to read about a particular initiative. The software is unable to differentiate between a bot and a real person.”
