Ryerson Alumni - 2018 Summer - 26

FEATURES

Social media:
The good, the bad
and the ugly
How do we harness the power
of connection for the better?
BY DAN FALK, JOURNALISM '92
PHOTOGRAPH BY DANIEL ERHENWORTH, IMAGE ARTS '03

OCI A L MEDI A H A S BECOME

such a fixture in our lives, it's
easy to forget just how new a
phenomenon it is. Facebook,
Twitter and YouTube have been with
us for barely a dozen years. In that
short time, however, they've gone from
being novelties used by teenagers and
celebrities to decidedly mainstream
information pipelines, capable of influencing public policy, sparking social
movements, and even shaping the outcome of elections.
The power of social media to change
the world is clear enough-but how
can we ensure that those changes are
positive? And how can we balance the
need for privacy against the pervasive self-disclosure that social media
encourages? Those are just a few of
the key questions that Anatoliy Gruzd,
director of research at Ryerson's Social
Media Lab, is trying to answer.
"The power of social networking
platforms to influence what we see and
what we read, and what connections we
form, is incredible," says Gruzd, who

also holds a Canada Research Chair in
Social Media Data Stewardship.
In 2014, the Social Media Lab opened
at Ryerson's Ted Rogers School of
Management after Gruzd came here
from Dalhousie University, where he
had started the lab four years earlier.
Gruzd's research has shown that
Canada is "one of the most 'connected'
countries in the world," as he puts it;
his lab has found that 94 per cent of
Canadian adults who use the internet,
have at least one social media account.
(Of the various platforms, Facebook
is the most popular-84 per cent of
Canadians have an account).
When the power of social media first
began to make a global impact around
the beginning of the decade, there was

Ryerson University Magazine / Summer 2018

a lot of enthusiasm that it was "going
to save the world," Gruzd says. "We
saw activists around the world using
social media to organize themselves
in support of democratic movements."
While those movements have continued, we've also seen the opposite trend,
with social media being used to spread
misinformation and hate speech.
An illuminating case study is how misinformation about vaccines has spread
through YouTube. While anti-vaccination videos are common on the platform, Gruzd and his collaborator at
McMaster University, Melodie Song,
discovered something equally troubling: Anti-vaccination videos were
more likely to be "recommended" by
the platform's algorithms than pro-vaccination videos. In other words, if you
watch one video on vaccination, the next video
you see is more likely to be
anti-vaccination, leading
›› Anatoliy Gruzd
viewers into a trap known
says the answer
as the "majority illusion,"
to the problems
posed by social
Gruzd says. "If you're only
media involves
exposed to a certain type
both policy and
of information, you start
technology.
believing that that's what
everyone else believes."
Addressing these problems will be a challenge.
Social media isn't going away any time
soon, and government control over
the internet naturally raises concerns
over censorship.
"The solution can't come from one
organization, from one entity," Gruzd
says. "It has to involve both policy and
technology." Social media platforms
have a responsibility to "clean up their
spaces." They can start with b et ter
filtering of abusive messages, and
empowering users to flag inappropriate
content, he says.
Gruzd also notes that despite these
challenges, social media can also be
a force for good in the world which
often goes unnoticed by mainstream
media-for example, allowing people
with cancer to form their own online
communities, and reach out to one
another for support.
Dan Falk (@danfalk) is a science
journalist based in Toronto. His books
include The Science of Shakespeare
and In Search of Time.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Ryerson Alumni - 2018 Summer