According to a studyby the International Panel on the International Environment (IPIE), much of the information on the internet is because of social media owners, politicians and the government. The study talked about how many of the social media concerns are because of their owners as well as domestic government and politicians.
The co-founder of IPEI, Philip Howard, says that social media owners have a lot of influence on social networking platforms as they control content distribution and apply policies. This affects the quality of information on social networks. If they spread information unchecked, it can pose a great threat to the global information environment. The findings of this study were by academic researchers in the fields of computer science, social sciences and humanities.
The research didn’t specify any social media platform owners but a co-author of the report stated that Elon Musk, the head of X, promotes his own posts on X. Recently, Frances Haugen, mentioned that Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Meta, doesn’t moderate non-English content as much as English content. TikTok can also be under pressure from the Chinese government as it is from a China based company, ByteDance. TikTok’s CEO says that the platform isn’t an agent of some country and Meta says it reviews content in more than 70 languages. X hasn’t said anything about itself.
The one-third of respondents who were surveyed said that they are expecting the information environment to become worse in the upcoming years. Politicians are also spreading theories and misinformation for their political gain. AI generated texts, voices, images and videos are also showing a negative effect for information spread. The researchers suggest that promoting a free and independent media and implementing digital literacy campaigns can help counter this problem.
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