Digital authenticity: The umbrella on your social media use.
Authenticity in digitally mediated spaces is of high concern right now. With the recent hacking events at Optus, we have been shown that our data is not safe. Breaches can occur, and vital information can be traded or sold on the dark web to the highest bidder.
Digital authenticity is as new as the technological architecture within which it resides. Which is to say that the more our lives transfer to a digital space, the more at risk we are of being susceptible to the effects of digital authenticity, or the lack thereof. In order to really unpack what this means to you even as a casual internet user (which I will delve further into in subsequent blogs), what I would like to do is highlight some key areas where authenticity online can affect you by listing two popular platforms and their corresponding risks.
Facebook was created in February 2004. With quick growth it became clear to Facebook in 2012 that over 83 million of its accounts were fake. In an effort to combat this widespread issue, the company introduced a “real name’ policy when setting up accounts. So, while they can be seen as being proactive in aiming to prevent fake accounts, this hasn’t kept them scandal free. In fact, in the 2010’s Facebook was at the heart of the Cambridge analytical scandal, where data from user accounts was mined and then used to provide analytical assistance to the United States presidential campaigns in 2016. This is an example of your data being used against you through targeted advertising on social media.
Instagram was founded in 2010 as a photo sharing app. With the rise of smart phone apps and their ability for users to self-brand, so too came the rise of the “instagramable life”. Users were curating their life into posts in order to receive likes and comments, thereby furthering their reach thanks to the algorithm used by Instagram to promote trending accounts. Along with paid promotions and the ability to digitally manipulate images online at the click of a button, how much of what you see on Instagram is actually real?
As you can see just in these two examples, authenticity is key to how we navigate our social media and the networks contained within. We are at risk of having our digital identity copied through the mining of our personal data, as well as being deceived in images by disingenuous users that have money and status as their main motivators.
In the next blog I will delve into these issues in more detail and explore the negative effects they have on society as a whole.