The meta corporation knows that its Facebook and Instagram products make people mentally ill and turn entire nations against each other.
(Photo: imago images/Cris Faga)
What a great invention social media is. We can broaden our horizons, find like-minded people, new friends or customers. And yet social media are rightly considered a danger to society today. The nature of this danger has not been properly recognized for a long time.
For years there has been discussion about a real name requirement or about the limits of freedom of expression. But the problem lies deeper, namely in the algorithms that decide which content users come into contact with.
EU legislators understood this better than many others. More than five years after Donald Trump was elected US President on a wave of false claims, there is finally a way to break the destructive power of social media.
The EU Parliament has completed its work on the “Digital Services Act”, or “DSA” for short. This law will give society access to the heart of social networks.
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Up until now, it has been a trade secret why a friend’s holiday pictures, a video with life hacks or the political message of a party are advertised to us on Facebook. It influences our mood, our worldview and our opinion.
One thing is clear: social media give higher weight to posts where they expect a lot of interaction. They upload content that makes us angry and content that strengthens our beliefs. Those who use social media therefore run the risk of becoming more and more angry with the world and of becoming more and more entrenched in their image of the world.
The more complex the world becomes and the faster it changes, the greater the longing for simple answers in a closed world view. One drifts into extremism, another believes in cosmic influences. And the algorithms of social media reliably deliver new material.
Responsibility cannot be left to Meta alone
The meta corporation knows that its Facebook and Instagram products make people mentally ill and turn entire nations against each other. The responsibility has become too great to leave to Meta alone. Not to mention the conspiracy accelerator Telegram.
With the DSA, the EU states will become more involved in the question of which content must be deleted. Above all, users will be able to find out the parameters according to which the platform sorts content. And they will be able to sort content purely chronologically.
In the future, the platforms will have to make public which advertising was played out to which target groups. This is a lesson from election campaigns in which different user groups were provided with different messages. Scientists should be able to research what else the algorithm does to us and gain deeper insights into it.
In the final legislative steps, the EU bodies must now be careful not to make any more mistakes. One such mistake would be making exceptions for major media outlets when fighting fake news. Because that would probably also include some offshoots of propaganda networks and conspiracy theorists.
In addition, the DSA must not be seen as the final attack on fake news. On the contrary: the newly enabled research on algorithms will make better regulation possible. The EU should therefore update its law regularly. Then the Digital Services Act will find imitators. It will then not only benefit Europeans, but people worldwide – and maybe even the networks themselves.
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