Social networks in media 3.0

In media 3.0, social networks not only play the role of providing personal information for users but also play the role of a major marketing and communication service provider, an effective and powerful communication channel to Internet users.

Statistics on statista.com in April 2017 show that Facebook has 1.87 billion active users. Of which, Vietnam is the 7th country in terms of Facebook users with 50 million people (April 2017). On average, Vietnamese people spend more than 5 hours online each day using computers and nearly 3 hours using phones.

The role of providing personal information

In the social networking environment, users often express themselves without any precautions, this is a great opportunity to collect the most authentic and useful information about users, which is difficult to obtain from other sources.

In media 3.0, technology and machines can capture a lot of information such as interests, needs, occupation, friends, location, etc. of a person depending on what that person shows on the Internet through web browsing, information searching, sharing, expressing opinions, etc. Today, a huge amount of information is collected from social networking sites, becoming a large data warehouse useful for communicators and marketers.

One problem is that social media has penetrated too deeply into the privacy of its users. When you decide to use social media, you are handing over a lot of your personal information to the social media owners without any precautions. Even if you only share a status update with one person or a group of people, the user has no control over what those people will do with that information. Any information posted on social media can be considered public or easily disseminated.

Top 10 countries with the most Facebook users (Statistics by statista.com, April 2017)

Young technology companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba…. All have business models that depend on exploiting big data. They actively encourage users to create as much data as possible by providing more and more useful and accessible products and services (free or low cost) to “entice” users.

From the user's perspective, the risk of personal data disclosure is due to users being too naive when participating in cyberspace: declaring on online shopping websites; declaring documents containing personal information such as online orders, bus tickets, shopping vouchers; providing copies containing personal information (ID cards, passports, etc.); unnecessarily disclosing personal details; disclosing private details in public spaces and on social networks; disclosing images in public spaces and on social networks; and not being careful in answering investigations and surveys.

To illustrate this, let’s look at the social media scraper https://stalkscan.com/. When a user copies a link to someone’s Facebook page into the tool, it will scan all the information it can find.

After scanning, we can choose to view information such as name, age, relationship status, photos, videos, events attended, games being played, groups that this person is in...

And more interesting information like what photos, videos, posts this person has commented or liked, what places this person has been to, what pages, books, movies this person is interested in, who are their friends and colleagues, what are they interested in...

This is all extremely valuable information for advertisers and businesses that want to market their products to the right potential customers. However, all the information on this page is just information that the user "innocently" publicly disclosed or shared with us, and what the Facebook administrator himself can grasp is much, much more than that.

Another example is Google, Google collects more personal information than Facebook because Google has a whole system of different software, including the social network Google+, the social network Youtube, the Google Chrome browser, the Google search bar, the Gmail email service... and most importantly, the Android operating system platform that is on billions of mobile devices. All of these software effectively exploit user information.

Google can store all of our “traces” on Google products

Google explains that the data collection is to improve user experience, as well as security when surfing the web. However, this also helps analyze user habits for advertising purposes.

Just go to https://myactivity.google.com/, log in to your account, and you can immediately see that Google stores all of our "traces" on Google products, such as which websites we visited, what we searched for, where we were during the day, what content we watched on Youtube, who our contacts were, what our voices sounded like... Detailed results will show the frequency of accessing websites, what devices were used to access, access time, what we searched for...

"Poster" of advertising content

Social media sites derive most of their revenue from advertising. Because they are bound by privacy terms, social media sites cannot disclose information to third parties. Instead, they often use big data on users' personal information to increase advertising activities on their own sites.

According to a study by Q&ME, in 2016, each Vietnamese social media user spent 237 minutes on the Internet each day, each user liked 48 brand fanpages on average, 57% clicked on Facebook ads within 7 days and 41% made a purchase after seeing an ad.

Social networks always know how to effectively use user data sources to post advertising content to the right people, with the right needs, thereby increasing the ability to convert into purchasing actions. A simple example is when we went on a business trip from Hanoi to Quang Binh in April 2017, as soon as the car arrived in Quang Binh, Facebook automatically recognized the location and suggested that I “check-in” at the exact place I had just arrived. During the group’s stay in Quang Binh, the Facebook pages of the group members always showed advertisements of a travel agency offering tours in Quang Binh, and Quang Binh’s scenic spots appeared in the famous Hollywood movie “Kong: Skull Island”.

In short, today, machines have been able to replace most human activities, especially in the media industry.

The emergence of web 3.0 with its superior intelligence has given media workers more tools to help convey accurate messages to recipients. The problem is to solve problems of user data, privacy, and choosing which tools to use to optimize big data.

These issues require media workers to have solid knowledge of technology, law, creativity and the courage to try new things.

According to the Journalist