How Do You Like Us Now? | Social Media
Misinformation and hate have soured our great social media dream.
In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg beat the likes of Julian Assange and Hamid Karzai to become Time magazine's Person of the Year. At the time, Facebook was six, and Zuckerberg, 26, both young enough to be cute. We asked Zuckerberg innocent questions then: Does social media impact reality or does it reflect it? Can we become 'addicted' to Facebook? Will social media make us asocial? Today, however, Mark Zuckerberg is being forced to answer questions less innocuous. Did Facebook help Donald Trump game the 2016 presidential election? Is our data safe with him? What has he done to curb online hate?
At the point of their inception, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram heralded a new optimism. If all of us were using the same
