The Social Media battle continues

Ever since the advent of social media, governments have been by and large caught off guard regarding its dangers. The youth continue to suffer tech hazards as issues of data privacy and security are yet to be resolved.

India banned TikTok and the US waged an erratic battle against it. The subject of Fake News continues to be a big one and governments are still grappling with legislation that will yield the correct results. Mainstream media is applying the screws and many countries may look at certain traditional media stepping off social media platforms altogether.

The social media companies themselves continue to be in the doldrums. Google’s acquisition of Orkut and launch of Google+ were all non-starters. Meta has crashed off late with Instagram getting even more flak than Facebook. Twitter, which always saw the least of revenue and was considered the most toxic, saw a management change and subsequently a name change to X. Now Elon Musk wants to turn it into a super app, a concept that has taken off in countries like China and Indonesia, but not America and India.

If you look at the last 10-15 years, then it’s been a hot royal mess. Social media. Traditional media. Governments. Officials. Fact checkers. Parents. Nobody is covered in glory here. Everyone seems to have messed up. The social media genie: Neither can it be controlled, nor can it be put back into the bottle. It continues to be a flashpoint during elections and two crucial national elections are coming up in two of the largest democracies in the world: India and America 2024.

While things will get nasty in India, it will be nothing compared to what will happen in America where people don’t remember when the country was that divided with some of the hyperbole talking about the Civil War of the nineteenth century.

The problem is that neutrality and fairness are quite abstract concepts, and the algorithms will definitely favour one party over the other. It’s inevitable. One party will cry foul no matter what happens. The scary truth is that there is no solution in sight, and this is how things will continue till things get so bad that a solution will be forced upon the world.

Barack Obama was the first social media president. Donald Trump took that to a totally new level. What will happen in 2024? The 2014 Indian elections were fought over Twitter and the 2019 ones over WhatsApp. What will happen in 2024?

One can’t even imagine what New Year’s Day in 2025 will be like.