USAGE OF DATA FROM SOCIAL MEDIA FOR POLITICAL REASON IS UNETHICAL

Social media is a significant part of our lives. It is hard to imagine our daily routine without checking apps like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp at least once. We use the apps to connect to people, share things and occasions of our private life.

Social media also provides us with daily doses of news, memes, life hacks, and many other things. We have an option to see what we like, and often we are suggested other relatable posts or pages based on our likes and searches.

A study by students of top international schools in India found that by assessing 10 Facebook likes, researchers could figure out more about a person than their average work colleague. Further, it also revealed that by assessing 300 likes, researchers could get to know a person’s personality more than their partner.

Hence it is not a hidden fact that our social media reveals a lot about us, and this is what politicians sometimes use to fulfill their agendas and spread propaganda. You might wonder how it can be possible as most of us have a private account on Facebook or Instagram. But the reality is quite different.

Another survey by a reputed boarding school in India shows that out of all the people who had public accounts, 15% did not even know that they could make their account private, and out of all the social media users, 42% did not change the default settings of their account. This provides others easy access into a person’s private life, and hence the information can be used for politics.

The deed is not legal, and even if it were, it would not be ethical for sure. Even the users of entirely public apps, such as Twitter, did not want any of their content used for research purposes, as Social Data Science Lab found. Any information that we put on our social media accounts is extremely vulnerable to any political parties and can be used for various purposes. Even the companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook use personal information and collect data for future use without the user’s consent.

In research done in February 2019, there were 3.48 active social media users, and the trend showed a yearly increase of 9%. This gives the researchers a wide range of age groups to target. Many children get involved with politics as they constantly come across such feed in their social media accounts.

A person’s private information is assessed by the data brokers hired by many political parties to understand the political inclination of the masses. Many political parties also run digital campaigns and use public and private data to target the audience. This violates our privacy rights and makes us face the harsh reality of social media that anything you like or post is easily accessible to others despite your account being private.

People want privacy to feel control over their personal information. When someone shares something on Facebook or Instagram, they do it for their friends and followers.

Though most of us are using social media, many are not aware of how entangled it is. In developing countries especially, people above 40 are not very proficient with social media. In such circumstances, using personal information and intruding into someone’s personal space is offensive. Politics must not cross the ethical barriers and use data from individual accounts for completing their agendas.

To quote C.S. Lewis, “We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private.” And hence it is highly unethical to use data from social media for politics.