who owns my media?

I accept the terms and conditions. Possibly one of the most commonly overlooked agreements in today’s world. You’re too busy trying to quickly make an account so that you can either order Uber Eats, or maybe make a Twitter for uni, or ordering an online gift so its here time for grandma’s birthday. You decide to overlook the 20-page agreement about your rights as a consumer. I mean we all do it, but just how exactly does it affect us? What are we signing away?

This week in classes we looked at how we are affected more and more by media ownership. Media ownership infers to the extent that media producers have influence over us, ie, the amount of newspapers/radio stations/news shows one company might own within an area.

When it comes to news consumption, I find myself consuming news most regularly through the social media platform Facebook. While it is a publicly listed company on the share market, creator Mark Zuckerberg has a substantial share in the business, giving him voting rights within the company. The website is pretty much a free platform for people to say what the like – to an extent. A problem that’s arisen with Facebook though is the desire for and sometimes lack of privacy.

When we agree to Facebook’s terms and conditions, we accept that they securely will store our personal and private data. Privacy is very important to people. Just how secure is our privacy in the hands of Mr Zuckerberg though? Recently, a company called ‘Cambridge Analytica’ was found to have accessed the data of thousands of Facebook accounts and used this information to convey political messages to users. This was very hard-hitting for so many Facebook users, many of which deactivated accounts and boycotted Facebook completely. How could we trust a platform that would let us be manipulated like this? 

We don’t.

When you write something on Facebook and publish that statement, it’s there for people to read, regardless of whether or not what you say is true. The problem with social media is that anyone is welcome to have their say – and not everyone is always honest. Many people just want to spread their own ideologies. Personally, I find it hard to trust Facebook and feel there’s a need a lot of the time to perform a bit of background research on things you may read there. Don’t take it all as gospel.

All in all, the internet has made our lives substantially easier in a lot of ways. Being able to agree to something 135 pages long has never been as easy as it is now. Remember when you do agree, just what it is you’re accepting – are you agreeing to be unconsciously persuaded and misinformed under the guise of free thinking?

Cheers,