Cooperating vs Malicious Agents: Social Media in Danger

Sometimes, there are more evil than good agents

I recently read this blog post which shows that social media introduces new ways for hackers to perform security threats. What really scared me in that post was the thought that social media could become filled with malicious agents undermining what a small number of cooperating agents are doing therefore turning social media into, well, anti-social media.

Cooperating agents

It is often said that social media should be used in an ethical way that could build reputation and trust, things that will lead to success in the Web 2.0 world. While the idea of benevolent social agents is noble, the fact is that measuring social media success is a very difficult thing to do. Furthermore, the social media platform does not incorporate any compensation mechanism for those volunteer agents of good. In other words, it is up to these cooperating agents to find a way to receive the benefits they can from social media. In the case of political activists, it is easy to imagine why they can spend numerous hours pushing for their political views without looking for a decent pay. However, if you are a business and that you follow the rules for social media customer interaction, you might ask yourself if it is worth spending all that effort on social media marketing only to generate a few sales here and there.

The beginning of a volunteering career

It is a known fact that people can’t really manage more than 150 contacts at personal level. Let’s say you are using Twitter to let your follower know about a promotion going on at your business, you will have to limit himself to a pool of 150 followers because beyond that, you will not be able to interact with your followers in a way that is going to be satisfactory enough for them to generate a sale for you. Of course, there are things that are going to be easier to achieve with Twitter (like sending links, pictures and files), but those extra sales that will happen because of your use of Twitter are not going to represent more than 20% of a business’s total revenue. However, the effort you will spend on Twitter is most probably going to represent more than 20% of your total expenses. In other words, your Twitter operations will be a loss and you will gain nothing more than the title of “Twitter Content Creator”.

The ant colony analogy

I like to compare social media to ant colonies where the combined cooperating actions of every ant leads to more food for the whole colony. Unfortunately, human beings are political unlike ants and they might want to work less but still have the same same amount of food than others. Therefore, people’s actions on social media will be directed towards their own interests, which would be as if ants could have conflicting interests. Let’s consider Digg.com where regular users are there to find out about important news, while power users will use the service to push for content they are promoting or being paid to promote. Basically, what these power diggers do is to introduce noise into the signal that regular diggers are hoping to get from the system. As we can see in this example, these two types of users have conflicting interest and that the sum of their actions is not of a cooperative nature. Let’s see how did this situation happened.

When trust agents become malicious

Regular diggers use Digg.com because they trust other diggers to be just like them and looking for cool stuff. This trust comes from the reputation that Digg.com has built itself because of a few links to funny websites. While a lot of regular diggers actually get involved in a cooperative way and help promoting some decent content, there are going to be at least a few who use the platform as part of their marketing campaigns. These people will have to spend a little effort to build themselves a reputation that will lead to trust and then start their spamming activities which will often go unnoticed. And this is how people go from the bright side to the dark side of the force…

Pure malicious agents: the social media’s mafia

You know what you have to do to be on Digg's top page…

Indeed, social networks can be gamed just like real society can be gamed and mafias can be created. I brought the example of power diggers who introduce spam or noise to the platform. If we consider what it takes two have a link shown on Digg’s front page, it is easy see that only a few diggers that have a lot of Digg friends can make it happen. These friends will be catalysts who happen to precipitate the popularity of a link that would have gone unnoticed otherwise. In other words, the power digger is not the only “malicious agent” in the system. He is supported by a whole network of malicious agents working together for their own interests. They act like a mafia or oligopolies who work together to dominate another group of people.

Social media needs regulations

Malicious agents are actually doing harm to the platform, but somehow, no one can get rid of them because they are part of the system. To minimize their harmful presence, social media needs regulations just like it need regulations in the real society. For example, antitrust regulations are there to ensure that there is a proper balance of force between competitors on the market. The FBI is there to make sure coffee shops and restaurants don’t get blown up because they can’t pay their dues in time. Of course, these regulations are not always effective, but they can be useful to a certain degree and their presence is necessary. The same principle should be applied to social media in order to give the same kind of protection to all users and most important to all content. Like the FBI who’s job is to fight organised crime, there should be a Digg Bureau of Investigations to make sure that a every content and its rating is authentic and not the result of a Digg ring pushing for promotional content.