Moral high ground

Something is wrong with social media. It's been widely publicised this week that the backlash is in full swing. This ongoing debate is not going to go away any time soon. I'm sure we've all experienced that world weary feeling whilst scrolling through our newfeed. For many of us it may be increasingly attractive to not engage at all. I try to limit most of my social use for professional purposes. But this means I am still complicit despite my Facebook account being a neglected place with no real reason to even exist.

One of my main proactive interventions is a refusal to let my children watch YouTube videos unsupervised. My fear being that they're just one 'recommended video' away from something potentially harmful.

The new Samsung Galaxy J2 Pro

This weekend Samsung announced their new J2 Pro Smartphone. It's main feature is that mobile data is totally blocked, including 3G and Wi-Fi. This device is being targeted at students who don't want to worry about data charges and need to focus on their studies. It's definitely an attractive option for me as my eldest approaches secondary school age!

For over 10 years people have shared the most intimate parts of their digital life. It is only now that they acknowledge feeding profit-maximizing surveillance machines. But Facebook can’t stop monetizing this personal data for the same reason that Costa can’t stop selling coffee - it’s the heart of their enterprise.

So why has it taken this long for people to get smart to this? For me the main reason is that people didn't want to hear it. The benefits were too alluring, enjoyable and empowering. A large proportion of the population are dealing with an addiction. So as with all addictive substances people become self destructive and continue regardless.

The instant gratification of social media use is prioritised over finding ways to make it less intrusive and exploitative. Recently we've seen many governments and organisations attempting to control this through policy. The cookie law was a distant failed attempt to be more responsible about data collection. I remember the panic we had to get this implemented on an old website! And now we have GDPR on the horizon <groan...>

But these efforts don’t touch the underlying problems, and in fact could make it harder for start-ups to compete with large corporates.

To really change the way the social media works the most effective route would be to take a genuinely moralistic outlook. If the moral compass of each organisation was clearly defined from the outset it would help prevent illicit behaviour. The argument being that in a cut-throat world you must join them in order to beat them. 

What starts out as a campaign to increase sales can soon take a dark turn as more aggressive methods are employed. We've all seen tactics such as re-targeting, click bait or the massaging of analytics data being employed. If all companies, and individuals, begin with a clear manifesto to control and define their behaviour these practices would cease. 

The original dream of social media was to produce healthy discussions, to unlock new forms of creativity, and to connect people to others with similar interests. This still happens in many circles and needs to be championed. 

Spring has sprung!

Social networks could, for example, give their users an automatic 'self-cleaning' option. This which would regularly clear their profiles of apps they no longer used, friends and followers they no longer interacted with, and data they no longer needed to store. If these tools were enabled, users would need to take action if they didn’t want their information to disappear after a certain number period. 

This would mean social graphs are temporary, rather than preserving them forever by default. It would undoubtedly be bad for most social networks’ business models. But it could create new and healthy norms around privacy and data hygiene, and it would keep problems from piling up as networks get older and more crowded. It might even recapture some of the magic of the original social networks, when things were fresh and fascinating, and not quite so scary. 

The subtitle of this blog has always been 'Digital Marketing with Morals'. This is something I constantly strive for despite often falling sadly short.