Title: Hard Questions: What Effect Does Social Media Have on Democracy? - About Facebook
Headings: Hard Questions: What Effect Does Social Media Have on Democracy?
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Hard Questions: What Effect Does Social Media Have on Democracy?
Foreign Interference
False News
Echo Chambers
Political Harassment
Unequal Participation
Giving Voice
So, What Effect Does Social Media Have on Democracy?
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Content: In one country we recently visited, a citizen reported that after he had posted a video critical of the authorities, the police paid him a visit to inspect his tax compliance. As more countries write laws that attempt to criminalize online discourse, the risk grows that states use their power to intimidate their critics. That could have a chilling effect on speech. Even in more open societies, we’re seeing cases where government officials write hateful posts that make enforcing our Community Standards challenging. So far, we’ve kept such posts up on our platform since we view them as newsworthy information that citizens deserve to know. We’ve also found these posts often become important magnets for counter-speech, but we recognize reasonable people may disagree with this policy. Our concerns with political hate speech aren’t limited to the online sphere — we also need to be vigilant that social media doesn’t facilitate offline violence. Policing this content at a global scale is an open research problem since it is hard for machines to understand the cultural nuances of political intimidation. And while we are hiring over 10,000 more people this year to work on safety and security, this is likely to remain a challenge. Unequal Participation
While foreign meddling, misinformation, echo chambers and hate speech get the headlines, what worries me most is how social media can distort policymakers’ perception of public opinion.