No one can deny the benefits that social media brings to us, but at the same time, it also makes troubles for us. In my opinion, quality issues are not only related to those social medias which contents are consumer generate, but also to the new media such as Google search engine. Nowadays, we can get much more free content from the web, which is along with the ads, for instance, Google is probably the most prominent example. I think there is no big difference between the traditional media and new media in terms of business model. When you search something from Google, you get a relevant ranking list which is basically ranked by how much money you pay for Google. I really found troubles in searching information from Google, which is normally I do not find the most relevant information I want on the top of the list; instead, some advertisements are on the top of the list. So, for some social Medias which contents are customers contribute, the other customers can monitor the quality and accreditation; but for Google search engine, who will control the quality of the content which the customers search for besides Google itself.
Recently, I read news about the biggest search engine website Baidu in China, which blocked the enterprises’ information on its website if this enterprise ranked on the top of the list and do not pay money for Baidu. At the same time, if there is any negative news for the company, the company can pay money for Baidu, and Baidu will block the bad news from the search engine users. I can‘t prove if this was a trustful news, but if it was true, what a terrible news it would be!
For the social media which contents are consumers generate, such as Youtube, which are along with the quality issues. As Benkler talked and illustrated in his book, there already have many ways to solve it; peer review ex-post is one example from Slashdot. I won’t give more examples about how these websites make their strategy to control the quality of the content. What I want to say is, the internet was supposed to be freedom. For those social media which contents are generated by customers, if they make so many rules in order to control the content quality, will they lose their customers for those who are considered bad content quality providers or for those who think it is so inconvenient? If the answer is yes, what will these social media do then?
By Qiong Jia
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nice point of view, but just some issues to discuss:
the Google findings ranking after your search is not ranked with how much money the companies pay, instead, it is ranked by how many clicks and links they have been hit by other people. So, in this way, no company can make itself top ranked just by paying. You can pay to be advertised in the right column in the google page not for the ranking.
about the new that you have heard in China, I was really shocked because it is very bad if some companies pay money to prevent bad news about them to publish but I think it is about the state-owned companies that the government want to save them untouched from criticism, but anyway it is a good idea to discuss that how can we fight with the censorship in the social media?
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