INTRODUCTION
The value of participation in social media accrues to the users at the individual level by impacting the self-wellbeing of the individual and at the societal level by means of civic engagement and thereby providing an increased thrust for larger use of social media. (Pendry and Salvatore, 2015). The benefits of social media are largely from the participative nature of contemporary digital environment.
The speed of embracing the social media technologies signifies that it has moved from a platform of information sharing to a platform of communication and entertainment (Collin et al., 2011). However, there are arguments that increased usage of social media is eroding the social construct, hampering the family relationships and values and eroding privacy. It is also limiting the social interaction and communication between individuals.(Mcgrath, 2012). Therefore a collective use of social technologies with reasonable privacy practices being followed will allow for a positive impact on social interaction and growth of digital sociology.
NOTION OF IDENTITY
The traditional notion of identity is a collection of personal characteristics or attributes. It has its bearing from social science wherein identity is a social construct and considered as things which needs an explanation and things which has a force which can explain it. (Fearon, 1999).
In the current times where in a group of applications (Facebook, Twitter, Four Square, YouTube, Flickr) as available on Internet and based on the foundations of development of technology (Web1.0 to Web 2.0), revolving primarily around generation of content by the user has gained momentum,and is changing the traditional notion of identity. (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010 p. 61).
The social media applications are creating a platform to exchange user generated content and the function of services offered by social media platforms is directly dependent on it. (Picazo-Vela, Gutiérrez-Martinez, & Luna- Reyes, 2012). Testimony to it are the messages from social media companies to their users about percentage of their profile being incomplete and urging time and again to include more and more personal information on their websites. Identification of the individual with a community and with a social category has gained dominance on these platforms.
However, in the current time, identity has taken wider construct and has started referring itself as a source of self respect or dignity. This gives the feeling that personal identity in the current world is an integration of individual’s self respect along with social category to which the individual belongs but not necessarily social category is central to the personal identity. So on one hand it looks like both are inter related and on another it looks like they are independent making identity a complex issue to be handled.
,br> The role of social media applications and tools in changing the human behavior is getting prominent but trust by people on social media applications and tools will go through a lot of tests before it gets grounded. (Sandoval-Almazan and Ramon Gil-Garcia, 2014)
SOCIAL MEDIA & ROLE OF GOVERNMENT
The government has the basic intelligence from the traditional sources but struggles to put the basic intelligence into some sort of advanced intelligence wherein meaningful information can be found out and more importantly predicted to reign in the trouble much earlier into the timeframe. (Ring, 2014). As social media is a platform wherein the users or the people from the government viewpoint generate the content by themselves, it offers the government a chance to use the available information to convert the basic threat intelligence into an advanced one (Sandoval-Almazan and Ramon Gil-Garcia, 2014)
As the social technologies increasingly were used for political and social activism, and examples were created like Arab Spring, wherein the governments changed and the way a government used to make the decision altered its course, governments also started using this new social technology to gain intelligence. They became aware that these new technologies have the potential to provide fuel to a social movement and can be transformational in nature (Sandoval-Almazan and Ramon Gil-Garcia, 2014) and as such timely intelligence is extremely important for sustenance. It is a foregone conclusion that states will not be bothered about the pressures to constrain the intelligence operations as it relates to the existence of the states. (Deeks, 2016)
SOCIAL MEDIA INTELLIGENCE
We live in times of social media and are completely surrounded by them. In social media people are reducing the differences between the self and the online world and are providing information wherein the online resembles nearly the self. SO when this massive transfer of self-information is happening on social media (Twitter is having a requirement of 750GB of disk space every week), society has started adapting to the new methods of communication it is imperative that the governments, law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community also start adopting the same. ,
As long as the usage of social media intelligence is for the good of the people allowing them the fundamental rights like food security, public health it is fine but when it starts treading on the privacy or erosion of civil rights, it becomes a cause of concern. The social media intelligence has been proved to provide near real time situational awareness like in the Mark Duggan case in United Kingdom which led to riots in different cities. The sudden burst of tweets from a geolocation can indicate a brewing situation and can help the authorities to take appropriate action.
In the society there, exists some groups whose functioning can jeopardize the security of the state and it is important that the authorities have adequate information about them to maintain law and order. Social Intelligence can be used herein to understand the key themes emerging, the potential or organizing a mob and other indicators which otherwise will be difficult to find out. However, there has to be appropriate legal coverage and legal validity at all times to maintain accountability of the social intelligence operations.
Most of the information is obtained by crosslinking the information available about an individual in one of the social media platforms with other social media platforms. So law enforcement under appropriate warrant can use the cross linking of information to find out some criminal who is on the run or in hiding.
These are apparent benefits of social media intelligence SOCMINT(Omand, 2012) but the challenges for the social media intelligence is in terms of its legality. The argument of the state will always be the necessity but legitimacy needs to be preserved at all times to ensure that there is adequate public transparency is maintained. It has been observed in the British National security strategy that places wherein the public acceptability of a state necessity is not there, it has damaged the state’s credibility in the long run.
One of the problems of the social intelligence is the vast amount of data at the disposal and no methodology developed by the social science discipline to handle the sample sets from large amount of social media data. Social media intelligence also requires huge technical capability to go through the data sets and determination of the naturalistic setting of the data is important to find out the real context and draw conclusions. If this is not done there can be profound issues and misrepresentations.
Other challenges of social media intelligence is to get the right skills and dissemination process reflecting the complexity in terms of access and dissemination of social media intelligence into the traditional policing organizations following the highest standards of information assurance.
CONCLUSION
It’s a reality that huge amount of personal information is being shared though social media now a days and this wealth of personal information otherwise is difficult to find in an unconnected world. Such is the extent of sharing that at times that it’s nearly impossible to manage it online and it appears that managing privacy is not possible. However, this should not be construed as that people are not bothered about privacy. Privacy itself will keep changing form as the technologies involve and the user’s perception changes. The biggest challenge is that there has to be right set of options and tools available with the user to protect their privacy as they seem fit in the ever changing technological world. Also the role of government by enacting the right set of laws to manage privacy and accountability of the government to use the social media intelligence has to be created. The principles of right motive, right authority, absolute necessity & sufficient cause should be followed at all times for social media intelligence activities by government and should be the last resort only. The new branch of sociology called digital sociology is the way to go.
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