ANALYSIS: A social media danger to society

Editor's note: This is the second report in a five-part series.

In the first report of this series, I wrote, “In the past, mass media output, especially newspapers, magazines and books were subject to the eyes of readers and other critics who kept a watch on their contents. Today, these information media still have some of this kind of review, but not as much as earlier times.”

In a much more rigorous fashion, the same idea holds true for scientific papers and academic manuscripts, including journals. These writings have long been subject to a vital process called “peer review.” It involves the piece being thoroughly examined by experts in the field of the manuscript’s subject matter. This review occurs before the work is published.

The process is not infallible as the reviewer(s) may make mistakes. But the practice has resulted in a remarkable collection — billions of published technical documents — that are factually accurate.

The importance of this widely used procedure cannot be overemphasized. Without it, shoddy, even self-serving information can be used to deceive the public. For bogus medical claims, ones that can result in riches flowing to their creators, it could result in unnecessary pain, even death. The falsities might very well result in defective medicines and flawed treatments.

During the past few years, this important human practice has come under assault. Our society has witnessed the proliferation of thousands of journals that do not meet the high standards of the publications many industries and millions of people have come to trust.

These shoddy, deceptive compositions are usually published rapidly, as time is not taken for a high-quality peer review. Most of these works are not checked for plagiarism or the methods by which the material was created, such as the lab procedures used to come up with the “findings” of the work.

What is to be gained from participating in what can only be called a scam — and a dangerous one at that? Reputable journals charge authors for publishing their work. In turn, many authors (say, research scientists) pay this fee from money they receive from grants and other donors.

The journals, hard copy and online, that participate in this rip-off are making millions of dollars for (likely) misinforming the public.

The creators of these works bear a great deal of the responsibility for this perilous practice. But, after all, the “publish or perish” sword hangs over the heads of many of them. Plus, that enticing incentive called recognition.

How big is this industry? The Scientific American journal states, “8,000 predatory journals publish 420,000 papers every year, nearly a fifth of the scientific community’s annual output of 2.5 million papers.”

These figures do not include the massive proliferation of false information on the Internet. Of course, most of the predatory journals’ junk ends-up online, thereby giving it an aura of authenticity.

To gain a sense of how influential the Internet social media vendors can be in the presence of predatory journals, misinformed “journalists” and misled writers — approximately 1/3 of the U.S. population — obtain their news from Facebook. In other parts of the world, Facebook news is consumed by 2/3 of the population. In addition, according to Jill Lepore, a reporter for The New Yorker, Facebook maintains personal information in its databases “of more than a quarter of the world’s people, 2.8 billion out of 7.9 billion, and governs the flow of information among them.”

Those statistics are impressive for a firm that is basically an advertising enterprise, one that collects information on its customers and sells advertisements based on its customers’ data. Given Facebook’s pervasive presence in many people’s lives, how it goes about interacting with these people, how it treats these people, is of great importance.

The same holds true for the other companies that play a prominent role in social media, such as the so-called “Big Five” tech companies, Alphabet (formerly Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (formerly Facebook, already mentioned) and Microsoft control much of the traffic in the Internet.

Later articles discuss ideas for addressing the predatory journal/predatory writer syndrome. The next article examines the manner in which cyberworld users (you and me) are being unconsciously roped into ideological corrals and marketing cages.

During his career, Uyless Black consulted and lectured in 16 countries on computer networks and the architecture of the internet. He lives in Coeur d’Alene with his wife, Holly, and their ferocious three-pound watchdog, Bitzi.