Can Data Lie? Social Media Titans’ Super-Speed Recovery and the Pervasive Disputes (II)

In a way, Twitter is becoming what Zuckerberg calls “the arbiter of truth”. This has enabled twitter to gain some support. But at the same time, there’s also a lot of opposition, who think Twitter has crossed the line.

Although Dorsey has been explaining that Twitter doesn't want to be the arbiter of truth, there are still quite a few people who think they are treated differently because of their different opinions. Gradually, some users’ distrust of twitter was fueled and ignited. Some users even chose to leave Twitter. Therefore, some unknown social platforms took over this part of the traffic.

Snapchat: Two Sides of “Privacy Protection”

Snapchat’s woes, compared with the fact-check troubles of Facebook and Twitter, are largely due to its lack of privacy. Snapchat’s claim to fame has always been its privacy feature, automatically deleting so-called ephemeral messages or after a period of time. 

Ironically, the social network’s biggest criticisms have also been on its privacy practices. In September 2019, former employees came out, anonymously, of course, to reveal that the company hasn’t exactly been exercising due diligence in making sure that a special tool primarily used for law enforcement and fighting abuse isn’t being abused by employees themselves to spy on Snapchat users.

That internal tool is called SnapLion, which is able to access data such as location, phone numbers, email addresses, and saved Snaps that haven’t been automatically deleted yet.

Over time, SnapLion has also grown to be used by Snapchat itself to fight bullying and harassment on the platform, but it was supposed to be limited only to employees that actually do need such access, from the company’s security staff to “spam and abuse” teams. As one former employee reveals, SnapLion has also been used to get that same user data for illegal purposes, which means users should probably presume that anything unencrypted is going to be viewable by humans.

For an application that provides the function of “deleting after reading”, users would no doubt have more faith in its privacy and thus send more intimate information. In this case, despite Snapchat’s quick denial of the revelation, the rumor still spooked lots of users, with lasting negative effects.