Lying on social media pays good money - that should worry us

There are more than 300 million monthly active users of Twitter, and 1.4 billion accounts. Eighty-three per cent of the world’s leaders are on Twitter and 79 per cent of accounts are held outside of the United States.

Twitter estimates 23 million of its active users are actually bots, says Kit Smith of Brandwatch. Smith adds that the “tears of joy” emoji has been tweeted almost 15 billion times.

A day’s worth of Tweets would fill a 10-million-page book and it took just three years, two months and one day to go from the first tweet to the billionth.

Twitter’s power has surpassed the dreams of its creators, and it is not alone. When WhatsApp’s founders first tried to sell it to Facebook and Twitter, they were rejected.  

Its founders, Brian Acton and Jan Koum, had worked together at Yahoo. Four years later, Facebook bought it for $19 billion.  

Like it or not, social media has changed the way the world is run. Social media’s user-generated-content approach has won and lost elections, triggered revolutions and skirmishes, it has prevented death from natural disasters and it is now used as a moral weapon of mass destruction.

Social media is a reflection of the new man; it is our cyber mirror: impatient, image-oriented, superficial and intemperate. We are interested in everything and we want it now. True or false? That’s irrelevant; conspiracy and gossip have relegated truth to an honourable second place on social media.

Tai Tran of Forbes says that Twitter’s citizen journalism was cemented in 2009, when a US Airways plane made an emergency landing in New York’s Hudson River. Janis Krums was on a commuter ferry at the time and took one of the landing’s first photos.

Two years later, Twitter was at the heart of the Arab Spring.

DEMOCRACY AS BUSINESS

In 2014, Oreo reacted amazingly fast and advertised its brand during a Super Bowl power blackout in the United States. In 2016 Twitter favoured Trump highly in his victory against Clinton. Trump’s team had known how to exploit the superficiality of Twitter by matching it to the frivolity of their candidate.

Social media is changing the world of communications, politics and governance.

Twitter is just over 10 years old but it has reached much further than its creators ever imagined.

Social media has pushed the limits of journalism almost to breaking point. These days, trending measures the success of seminars or gatherings, no matter how silly or insignificant.

Twitter’s complicated, scary supremacy is built on the power of the hashtag (#), that short, incisive and poignant phrase that means a lot more than it says. Hashtags begin as slogans or catchwords and soon transform themselves into mantras, revered by many as Bible truth.  

Slogans are essential to marketing. Whether in politics or business, winners usually have powerful mottos. Apple’s “Think different”, Nike’s “Just do it”, GE’s “Imagination at work”, McDonald’s “I’m loving it” or Dunkin’ Donuts’ "America runs on Dunkin".

In politics, party democracies have become just businesses. We all remember “Yes we can” or “Change we can believe in”, “Tuko pamoja” and “Make America great again”. Curiously, Hillary Clinton’s slogan does not jump to my mind with the speed of Trump’s. It was clearly a flop.

When repeated again and again, slogans become a kind of religious mantra held as solid truth and Twitter is the perfect lab for this.

At Twitter we create, build and destroy reputations; we spread rumours and shock consciences. We mix truth, facts, imagination and lies without a guilty conscience.

The world of communications has changed. Every person is a journalist, every phone a newspaper. There is no time limit, censorship or restraint. This has given us a powerful weapon, which people may use for noble or ignoble purposes.

WELL-MANAGED IGNORANCE

A new career has developed too fast in Kenya, that of the social media mercenary. These mercenaries are goons hired by interest groups, cartels or media warlords. They have no conscience and thrive on chaos, disorder and disdain.

It is sad, but they are here among us, and they are making money. We often invite them to seminars and TV stations. We do not like them. In fact we abhor what they do just for the sake of money, with an attitude of holier than thou but we cannot say so too loudly.

An open letter to Education Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang'i posted on Nailab founder and CEO Sam Gichuru's Facebook page has gone viral. In the write-up, the author explains that in Kenya we do not care about heroes, and we do nothing for them. We are just passive recipients of an agenda, and we follow it like sheep do a shepherd. The letter says:

“They will dig into your past, and they will find a scandal. They will dig into lands, into ICT and into anything you have ever touched, and if they don’t find anything, they will fabricate it. They don’t need much; nobody cares to double-check until it’s too late, just enough to crucify you... The President will have a discussion with you, he will know you are innocent but you will have to step aside due to the political risk.”

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Social media has turned a wonderful dream into reality. It has democratised information flow and brought the power of information closer to the people, but which people?

Social media mercenaries are the worst type of killers. The truth is only known to them and their pockets full of lies, sensationalism and well-managed ignorance. They kill consciences and jeopardise the country’s future, the future of their own children.

Paraphrasing something I wrote two years ago, I daresay now that a bullet from an irresponsible shooter can kill one person, but a lie tweeted by a social media mercenary can kill a whole generation.

Dr Franceschi is the dean of Strathmore Law School. [email protected]; Twitter: @lgfranceschi