Social media has become a major vector for web-based attacks. This was confirmed in early September by TechCrunch, who reported that state and private interference in social media has become a global problem. In the face of these ever increasing attacks on the world’s most popular variety of web service, technology is providing answers.
Bringing clarity
A major technological change that has shaped modern social media is the presence of bots. Botnets have been a factor in digital technology for a long time, but the manner in which they are propagated and influence social media has advanced. A study reported in the influential Engineering and Technology Org magazine found that bots are influencing how people communicate, showing the startling extent of bots in the modern digital sphere. What is required here is access for more ‘real’, human input in social media discourse. According to industry insiders Social Media Daily, the key is in encouraging more people to get online and use social media. Technology is doing this by making social media more accessible across the planet, meaning more followers for more accounts and less influence for bots.
Looking to AI
Artificial intelligence is being name dropped as the answer to a litany of modern problems, and the prevalence of fake news and bots on social media is no exception. As noted by a Forbes digital council post, neural networks have the ability to identify and remove fake news from live social media networks by analyzing every piece of data that runs through it. Fed by huge 120gb datasets containing up to 5,000 articles, these high tech new robots will be able to skim through and filter social media in large swathes.
Advanced privacy measures
One of the side effects of the attacks social media is experiencing is the loss of privacy. Private data was already under attack in the early 2000s from gargantuan data-collecting schemes, and now the presence of bots and other malicious agents online has recreated this whirlwind within social media. According to the World Economic Forum, this is being directly challenged by the likes of blockchain and Terbium. Providing an audit trail and ways to secure private and personal data, of most note is the ability of these technologies to show when your data has been fraudulently accessed and moved. These technologies should become yet another weapon in the arsenal against social media based attacks.
Social media remains one of the main reason that most people use the internet. This popularity, and the influence it can have on the world, has seen it attacked by unscrupulous entities. Through new technology, genuine users of these services are recapturing control.