Basil Jarrett | Social media: The other pandemic

I HAVE a love-hate relationship with social media. It started years ago when a friend introduced me to Facebook as the greatest thing to happen to dating since women. The relationship quickly soured when I witnessed his attempts to privately woo a young lady on the platform, but accidentally ended up broadcasting his affinity on a public wall instead of in a private inbox.

There was much consternation and angst when her significant other showed up at his dorm room a day later. Since then, my relationship with social media has been an uneasy one. While I will be the first to tell you about the awesome power that the medium has unleashed by democratising information and communication, you will also hear me utter the words “nothing good has ever come from a tweet” whenever someone loses a job as a result of an ill-advised post. But aside from horrible dating accidents and regrettable tweets telling the world how you really feel about the Miss Jamaica finalists, there is a more dangerous side of social media that currently threatens to derail our attempts to beat COVID and return to life’s regularly scheduled programming.

THE SOCIAL MEDIA CONUNDRUM

As if finding a cure and a vaccine wasn’t hard enough, the world is also facing a pandemic of lies, half-truths, conspiracy theories and hoaxes which have found a lively host in the swampland known as social media. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), noted at the height of the COVID pandemic last February that, “We’re not just fighting an epidemic, we’re fighting an infodemic” in the form of “fake news” that “spreads faster and more easily than this virus.”

Thanks to this veritable breeding ground of lies surrounding COVID, social media has now put us in direct confrontation with science, reason and good old-fashioned common sense.

WHAT ABOUT THE FUTURE?

The logical question then should be, if social media is such a dangerous weapon of mass deception, why hasn’t the Government moved to bring it under tighter control and regulation? The simple answer is that social media represents the truest form of free speech as protected by the Constitution. Free speech advocates will argue that the best solution to bad speech is more good speech, that ideas must contend, and that in the end, false and misleading narratives will be exposed and destroyed by the truth.

The not-so-simple answer may be that the Jamaican Government is in no position to pressure tech companies into more responsible use of their technology. Others see technological itself as the solution, with more and more social media platforms developing algorithms and artificial intelligence intended to detect, flag and remove false information. Then there are those like me who believe that social media will aid and empower the ugly, awful side of humanity rather than subdue it. We see it all the time, where the first person to arrive on an accident scene pulls out his cell phone, not to call an ambulance, but to record and share the gory details on his Instagram Live. Which brings us to the matter of the law and the role it plays in policing socially responsible use of social media. For their part, law enforcement and our justice system seem to be struggling to mount effective responses to this problem. Take the much ballyhooed ‘ice-cream’ social media event from a few months ago. The Jamaica Constabulary Force went to great lengths to distance itself publicly from the actions of an overly enthusiastic officer, going as far as to interdict him for bringing the Force into disrepute. They missed a glorious opportunity, however, to use the most viral video of the year to send a strong message to the public that cyberbullying and revenge porn are criminal acts with grave consequences. Surely the officer did not leak his own compromising tape, and at the very least, an immediate investigation should have been launched to determine whether or not a crime was committed by whoever put the video out. But such is the challenge of social media; A boon one minute, a bane the next.

What is for sure, however, is that the longer misinformation and disinformation clouds the COVID narrative, the longer we will have to contend with the pandemic. Understandably, some amount of misinformation can be reasonably expected to occur as we are grappling with a new virus. Mistakes will happen, information and interpretations may change and knowledge and solutions will evolve. Disinformation, on the other hand, occurs deliberately and involves that darker, more sinister side of the coin where bad actors with hidden agendas will seek to promote a particular belief, knowing fully well that it is false. Regardless of the motive, the end result is what one writer has described as ‘truth decay’ in modern society, and an erosion of confidence in some of the very public health institutions, such as the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that were created to protect us from these very same ills. Even our very own Ministry of Health is not immune.

These challenges will increase as social media technology gets more pervasive and invasive. What is required, therefore, is relentless pressure on social media companies to flag, delete or correct COVID-19 disinformation and misinformation. Government may be reluctant to appear to be restraining free speech and subduing independent thought, but this unconventional pandemic requires unconventional thinking and unconventional solutions. The task may appear to be futile when one looks at how the United States Congress is itself struggling to rein in tech giants like Facebook. Daunting it may be, but considering that half of Facebook’s revenue and over 80 per cent of its users come from outside the US, then perhaps there is some hope that our voices will find a listening ear.

Basil Jarrett is a communications strategist and CEO of Artemis Consulting, a communications consulting firm specialising in crisis communications and reputation management. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com; basiljarrett.artemis@gmail.com