Governments, corporations, and other institutions of public and private power have been fooled into thinking that social media is representative of popular opinion.
Data reveals that not only is most content on social media skewed to the Left, but it is also predominantly created by a tiny percentage of total social media users.
This means that the most widespread opinions circulated on these platforms are not representative of public attitudes and perspectives, but only the opinions of a small segment of the people.
Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter amplify ideas that do not resonate with the masses in real life. This is true globally, and it is true in Malaysia.
A good example of this is the fact that we saw reports in the Malaysian press about a trending hashtag (#KerajaanGagal), which supposedly indicated broad dissatisfaction with the Perikatan Nasional government.
But within days, we also had the results of a large-scale poll that gave Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin a high approval rating, exposing the disconnect between reality and the version of reality portrayed on social media.
As Internet use has increased, social media has gradually replaced people's reliance on legacy media as the primary source of information, and as consumption of online content has exceeded real social interaction (particularly since the pandemic), platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have increasingly become the arbiters of truth, the interpreters of reality, and have transformed from being vehicles of free expression to being instruments for the enforcement of acceptable opinion.
It is, therefore, concerning that discourse on these platforms bears little resemblance to the views held by the population.
Around 85 per cent of people polled globally say they get their news from social media.
So when we consider that roughly 90 per cent of the content on Twitter, for example, is created by just 10 per cent of the people who use the platform, we can see the danger.
Add to this the fact that social media usage skews to the Left on all platforms, sometimes by as much as almost 30 percentage points.
The opinions and attitudes circulated on social media do more than misrepresent public opinion. They are becoming a form of mass indoctrination.
Unacceptable opinions can be silenced, as every platform reserves the right of editorial veto power over what users may post, which then creates a false perception that the views allowed on the platform are the only views that exist.
This is inherently coercive and is, whether by design or not, a mechanism for engineering the opinions of society, rather than simply reflecting them.
Politicians and journalists are increasingly referring to social media to gauge public opinion, so, given the above, it is not an exaggeration to say that social media poses a threat to democracy.
These platforms to do not tell you what the population thinks. They tell you what a tiny percentage of the population, and what the owners of the platforms think the people should think.
So we must never believe that the controlled discourse on social media is genuine public discourse, and our leaders must understand this too, otherwise we will find ourselves dominated by a comparatively radical and intolerant minority who do not believe the rest of us even have a right to speak.
The writer is founder, Centre for Human Rights Research and Advocacy (CENTHRA)
