By MJ Soriano
When personal life is made known through public spaces, do we waive our right to public scrutiny?
Meta — the trillion-dollar company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — boasts an enormous user base of over 3 billion monthly active users, including more than 100 million Filipinos. Its tagline, “Real People, Real Connections,” paints an image of authentic interaction and genuine community among its users. However, what type of connection does it promulgate? And more importantly, are users being subtly manipulated by algorithm-driven polarizing propaganda disguised as genuine connection?
When Mark Zuckerberg was still a Harvard undergraduate, he hacked into universities’ systems to illegally obtain photos of female students, posting them on FaceMash (now Facebook) that allowed users to vote on who was “hot” or “not.” Beyond the blatant violation of privacy, this early experiment revealed a deeper mechanism — the collection and analysis of user opinions based on polarized choices. This simple binary system of “hot” or “not” became the conceptual foundation for what Facebook would later perfect: gathering vast amounts of user data and using algorithms to feed content that reinforces individual preferences, effectively creating digital echo chambers.
Polarization poses a threat to public perception and in turn the very fabric of society– our intersubjective reality or the systems which are built on the foundation of similar understanding if large groups of people. Still, we partake in Social media sites because as the new public sphere it became an important venue for public connection, to utilize it properly we have to understand the nature of two roles in such platforms– producers and consumers.
Producers
We learned in Constitutional Law about zones of privacy, areas in which we are protected from intrusion by law or the Constitution. Social Media poses a conundrum—whether or not it is public or private in nature.
Zuckerberg’s FaceMash violated the tenets of Data Privacy when he subjected unwilling people to public judgment and scrutiny. However, that is no longer a problem now, because we, ever so willingly, post our own photos and curated content in our social media accounts where we subject ourselves to both public praise and judgment.
The Supreme Court, in the case: Vivares vs. St. Theresa’s College, ruled that when users post even to “friends only” the same remains outside the zones of privacy because the number of friends may constitute a few hundred or more.
So when we post an infamous take or controversial content, we cannot claim to be victims of public scrutiny and assail our right to privacy and expression when the same is outside our zones of privacy.
A post is a limelight, a feed is a curation of who we present ourselves to be. It gives us attention– both wanted and unwanted.
Consumers
An algorithm is an understanding of our Social Media of what we like or desire.
Just like FaceMash users, we judge what is in and what is out—when we hit our like button, give more than a second of retention, we, voluntarily or involuntarily, feed our algorithms what we think is desirable or worthy of our attention. And Social Media pages love our attention and feed us an echo chamber of what we like. The danger of this– we shut our ears to opinions, even facts, different from what our algorithm feeds us.
Generation Z grew up with social media, which developed and changed faster than the law could catch up. Today, social media not only poses the threat of blurry concepts of privacy, but also subjects the public to widespread hate powered by systematic disinformation– because we have been trapped in a system that feeds off our attention and leaves us craving for more.
If we do not proactively choose what is in our algorithm, we can easily be swayed by trends and topics social media pages want to feed us. To be a proactive social media user is to choose the content you want and not depend on algorithms.
In the age where social media is a primary tool for connection and participation, we have to learn fast about its implication and regulate faster than the potential harm or damage. Self-regulation is the first step. The second step is state regulation, which legislators have to look into the aspects Cybercrime Protection law missed— a clear-cut definition of private and public zones on the web, systematic misinformation, holding corporations who create unilateral and inequitable contracts accountable, protection of young users in open and public servers, among many others.
Social Media is here to stay, it is the New Public Sphere, and it has to be regulated the way we regulate public spaces.
THE BARRISTER 