THE NEW OIL
By Noah Jalango + Alexis Moten
In Americana we discussed the journey of building the American Dream. This article depicts the unique nature of social media in America and how it’s grown beyond its territories and now encapsulates a global audience with worldwide perspectives. The ways in which companies operate and grow are reflections of American values, and this inspired us to investigate how our current social media culture influences our relationships with these digital platforms, information and each other. The “new oil” represents what we believe to be the most valuable resource in the world-digital engagement.
July 16, 2010. An angled picture taken of South Beach Harbor in San Francisco, seen through the windows of an unidentified room, appeared as the first-ever post on a new app called Instagram. This mundane photo – captionless, lacking people, and uninterested in selling a product – almost seems counterintuitive to the body-centric, advertisement-forward content that can regularly be seen on the app 14 years later. There was a certain beauty in the early days of the now multi-billion-dollar social media companies. Instagram was created so users could instantly share pictures of interesting things they saw. Twitter (now X) was founded so individuals could share messages to groups of people, similar to SMS texting. Facebook began merely as a website meant to connect Harvard students around campus.
In the beginning, these websites and apps were playgrounds for virtual public expression. They were toys that allowed users to connect with people from as near as the house next door to across the globe. Have an interesting shower thought? Tweet it. Take a cute picture of a dog? Post it on Instagram. Want to congratulate Veronica on her wedding? Post on her Facebook wall. Those small glimpses into the lives of the users was the kind of content that populated these platforms. That’s what constituted “news.” For updates regarding global events, one would typically turn to more traditional forms of media (like newspapers and television/radio broadcasts) to educate themselves. In 2024, these traditional forms of media still exist, but the astronomical growth of the aforementioned social media platforms became the new place to consume and react to news. Those “toys” have now become the “tools.”
As social media platforms have grown in popularity, they’ve evolved. The platforms are no longer solely focused on a single medium of information sharing. Most social media platforms now offer the ability to post content in the form of text, photo, and video (both pre-recorded and live). Advertising is rampant amongst the platforms. Users can purchase products through these apps or spend money to access specific features. These platforms need to make money, and they make the most money by keeping users within the app or website for as long as possible. Now how do they do that? By taking a page out of the traditional media playbook: learning that chaos, controversy, and conflict are best-sellers.
THE CATCH UP
We face an unprecedented situation: a war during the thrive of influencer culture and post-truth politics.
After Hamas militants launched a surprise attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, killing at least 1,000 Israelis and taking at least 150 hostages, Israel declared war against Hamas and retaliated. Live streams of the terrorist attack flooded out of the region and onto social media, predominantly on TikTok and X. Some of the images were posted by victims on the ground at the attacks. Some were reportedly seeded by Hamas, but others were years old, taken from previous conflict zones in other parts of the world. Some were lifted directly from a fictional video game. Some were artificially created with deep fake tools. A war was happening (kind of).
Today, the images and videos circulating, especially across social media, are offering poor representation of the truth of what happened on Oct. 7 in Israel. This is partly due to the Israeli government’s understandable efforts to protect the privacy and dignity of the victims, and abstaining from publishing evidence of the atrocities against Palestinian civilians, who share the same territory with Hamas, committed to the public. At the same time, the content that is flooding social platforms now reveals the brokenness in how people around the world are consuming information about the events of the Hamas attack and the subsequent Israel-Hamas War. There is ample heart-wrenching footage from Gaza across social media platforms amidst significant civilian casualties, as of February 10, 2024 and estimated 28,064 Palestinians have died;There is also rampant misinformation fomenting anger, and extremist hate alike.
Vox news reported that since the Israel-Hamas war, Palestinians and their advocates have begun using “algospeak,” an evasion tactic for automated moderation on social media, where users create new words to use in place of keywords that might get picked up by A.I.-powered filters.
There’s even now an algospeak term for Palestinians as well: “P*les+in1ans.” The creation of these strategies express the concern among many people posting and sharing pro-Palestine content during the war between Hamas and Israel that their posts are being intentionally suppressed.
The complexities of warfare on social media are further intensified by the application of algorithms. War produces a swell of violent imagery, propaganda, and misinformation online, circulating at a rapid pace and triggering intense emotional responses from those who view it. This is inescapable. However, algorithms have been adopted by social media platforms as a method to adapt the platform to each user; they spot users’ preferences of content and shape the ads and recommendations each user would like to see. Content creators and viewers alike benefit from this curation tool or “algorithmic culture” because it shapes their content to format their perception; they can target individuals and find their audiences easily. In 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, scammers took advantage of the information loop to claim they were on the front lines in order to get views and deceive people into donating to fake fundraisers. Social media can also be used as a tool to control and win the “narrative war.” The concern from digital rights observers is that content about Palestinians is not being treated fairly by the platforms’ moderation systems, leading to, among other things, shadowbanning.
SPEED OF CONSUMPTION
The internet began the warping of space and time – and social media accelerated it. What does this mean? The internet allows people from across the world to digitally connect with each other in a variety of ways. Thus, the physical restrictions preventing these connections to occur in person are eliminated. Space is “warped” to make it feel like two people are near, when they are actually hundreds of miles apart. Social media paved the way for and popularized the idea of sharing content in real-time. Individuals no longer have to wait for tomorrow’s newspaper to know what happened today. Thus, time is “warped,” and the historical delay that existed between events occurring and the public learning about them was eliminated. News can now exist and spread online and across social media platforms as it happens.
As the speed in which information travels has increased, the speed in which individuals consume news online has also increased. There’s a reason why traditional media outlets are prioritizing social media platforms and are creating a different style of content than they have in the past. They learned longform content doesn’t really work on social media. Because there is a seemingly unlimited amount of content on these platforms, the goal of any person, company or organization looking to get clicks on their link is to grab attention as quickly and efficiently as possible. While it takes only a millisecond to click on a link, it takes just as little time to scroll past it. “Clickbait” – the term used to describe intentionally misleading or provocative headlines, images, or posts – is a direct result of this phenomenon. It is a tactic frequently used by creators and organizations to bring more traffic to their website. More website traffic means more advertisement viewers, more advertisement viewers means more money, and money keeps the lights on.
The speed in which individuals consume news online directly relates to how quickly individuals actually process the information they’re consuming. Everything happens so fast on social media platforms. On any app, one can scroll through 20 posts in 10 seconds, all related to completely different people, places, and ideas. When presented with a large quantity of information in a short period of time, the human brain’s working memory – its limited thought capacity in a given moment – can quickly become overwhelmed and exhausted. This results in a feeling of “cognitive overload”. The inconsistency in the type of media being rapidly consumed (be it text, photo, or video) also makes it difficult for the brain to coherently process information. Users are subsequently more susceptible to being influenced by false information, advertising, or simply the number of likes on a post.
SOCIAL STUDIES
A saying that often goes with live reporting is “the cameraman never dies,” a rule that means as long as the camera is rolling, whoever yields it will come out unharmed. This urban myth has become the miraculous shield for Palestinian activist and journalist Bisan Owda, who has garnered attention for her semi-regular video and livestream updates on social media documenting Palestinian civilians' experiences during the Israel-Hamas war. She is known for opening her videos with a variation of the phrase "I'm still alive." As of February 12, 2024, Owda had accumulated over 4 million followers on Instagram, a tremendous climb from her 180,000 followers in October 2023. Owda's videos and reports have been shared by the likes of ABC News, Al Jazeera, the BBC, and other news outlets. As of February 24, 2024, 94 Palestinian journalists have been killed.
People have written about wars for thousands of years. From Herodotus’ accounts of the Greek-Persian war to English dystopian novelist George Orwell’s experience as a soldier in the Spanish war, telling the truths of combat has been a matter of preserving the unforgettable. War correspondence is one of journalism's most critical and impactful forms of reporting. To bear witness to the brutalities and horrors of warfare and retain the capacity to publish them for the public is the noble duty of war correspondents. In the early 1800s, for the first time, the American public could read about the reality of warfare through the lense of Sir William Howard Russell, an Irish reporter with The Times who is considered to be one of the first modern war correspondents. He spent 22 months covering the Crimean War; his dispatches simultaneously informed and repulsed the public, instigating supporters to demand the government provide better treatment for their troops. This would provide a glimpse into the future of public backlash to viewing scenes from the battlefield. When early film and television arrived in the 20th century, war coverage was just a collage of footage provided by other sources, often by the government, and then a narration would be added in post-production. This footage was often staged as cameras were large and bulky until the introduction of portable motion picture cameras during World War II. In 1941, President Roosevelt created the Office of Censorship following the Pearl Harbor attacks. The Office of War Information was designed to suppress visual material that they feared would threaten domestic unity. Indeed, the impacts of war and media would never be the same after TV networks followed young soldiers to the jungles of Vietnam. Images from the Vietnam War were consumed daily by a generation that would begin to doubt the integrity and intentions of the United States government. These questions would fuel civil rights activism and anti-war protests.
Prior to the introduction of social media, government control over the news was comprehensive. Today, the Israel-Hamas conflict has generated a kaledioscopic inventory of primary sources reporting in real time, along with remixed and deep fake images and videos competing for the world’s attention and allegiance. Social media may have altered the methods by which users can consume, digest, reflect, and produce; however, that’s exactly what the technology was meant to do. Social media is disruptive by design. The temptation to condemn social media’s faults is especially acute due to the fact that we’re in a time of war (Russo-Ukraine; Israel-Hamas). Considering the history that public opinion has over the success or failure of government operations, we have to look at how social media affects a person’s ability to establish their own beliefs.
GOOD VS. BAD (JUDGMENT)
Unless a user is intentional in taking a moment to consider what they’ve just read or watched, they’re instantly consuming and creating a personal point-of-view. As referenced above, these conclusions are often made in environments that are not conducive to processing information. If the posts are about something harmless, like deciding if a dress is black and blue or white and gold, the consequences are minimal. But when delicate subjects like war are involved, there can be serious repercussions. Information regarding life, death, human rights, and historical conflict are extremely complex. Forming a split-second judgment on who is “good” and who is “bad” is a hazardous practice – and there’s not often a simple answer. On social media, however, forcing users to come to these definitive conclusions as quickly as possible can serve certain individuals and organizations well.
As previously mentioned, social media and the internet have warped space. During wartime, social media brings conflict that is far away very near to us via digital devices. While users aren’t directly participating in the conflict, they can be convinced online to voice their support of one side or another. Thus, a digital “narrative war” is created – and ultimately perpetuated – on social media platforms. Organizations and individuals can take advantage of this idea by creating propaganda and spreading misinformation. One misleading headline or fake image is all it takes for some people to make that instant judgment, and it can be difficult to change after it’s made. It is of the utmost importance that consumers of digital news pay attention to what they’re seeing, understand who created it, and save making their judgment until after corroborating what they’ve seen through other sources.
It is important to note, however, that one of the benefits of social media, especially in wartime, is that it provides historically underrepresented and suppressed voices with a large platform to share their stories. Some media outlets are unable to, or simply choose not to, report in certain parts of the world or speak about certain issues. This is where individuals have the ability to act as a citizen journalist and record their experiences themselves. Through social media, the power of disseminating information is no longer solely in the hands of big media outlets. With a smartphone phone and a decent wifi signal, anyone can share breaking news. In certain cases, this allows certain groups to fight against the spread of lies and false information that are commonplace amidst digital narrative warfare.
CONCLUSION
So, how will this impact the future of digital engagement? Futurecast is our predictions on the possible outcomesfor this subject, considering the history, facts and patterns involved in this issue. The symbiotic relationship between social media and war coverage will continue to be shaped by public discourse influencing global perceptions and communities. Our prediction for the future is that policies and trends in social media platforms are likely to revolve around tighter content moderation, enhanced user-verification and new fact-checking measures that may delay the traffic of information or come with a payment barrier, perhaps adopting a similar subscription plan incentivized by Elon Musk’s X to charge new users $1 a year to access key features, including the ability to like, bookmark, create list, post, and repost. User-generated war correspondence is here to stay, so it will be met with an insistence to control the narrative. Anticipate a quick wave of semantic changes.
An increase in transparency is ultimately the ideal vehicle for social activists and influencers working to lift up stories that would otherwise go unnoticed, however, we have to consider the pattern of pushbacks that come with social change. Every new frontier has a leveling stage; the role of social media during conflicts will remain paramount, prompting debates on free speech, media harm prevention, and social platform's responsibility to the public, to truth and accuracy. Moving forward, humanitarian organizations have an opportunity to join in collaboration between social media platforms and government bodies as an accountability check so that neither parties are abusing their influence outside of these digital landscapes to deter, penalize or silence human expression.
