How social platforms allow your data to be weaponised

When Australians woke on Monday and read about the industrial scale of personal information harvesting of influential citizens on behalf of Chinese intelligence agencies, via social media and other online sources, they saw another layer added to a growing pile of revelations about the peril of life seen through a social media window.

The stories revealed the ability of Chinese operatives to mine the vast amount of data available online to knit together detailed profiles of millions of people around the world, and to use the data to seed divisive misinformation campaigns across various social platforms.

It is conceivable that US, British, Australian and other nations are also mining and scraping publicly available information for their own ends, highlighting just how much people have told the world about their lifestyles, beliefs and proclivities, in Tweet-sized chunks.

While a CEO or politician might feel like they are simply giving their followers an appealing dash of personal charm with a Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter post about the relaxing weekend they spent at their in-laws' place in Bellingen, they are, in effect, helping operatives pull together data points and map their contacts in alarming detail.

That is not to say people must remove themselves from social media; rather, we all need to wise up about what is really necessary to share.

For those in positions of influence and authority, it is also a reminder they must closely police how they are being represented on different platforms, lest they find themselves being used to promote causes they don't agree with.

But what of the tech platforms themselves? Scraping data from big platforms such as Facebook is against the terms of service, and Facebook has sought to take action against some companies, such as Australian social media marketing platform Stackla, when it believes it is occurring. But it doesn't mean the platforms are collectively doing enough to stop this kind of activity.

"Ninety per cent of military-grade intelligence data can be obtained from open data analysis," the Chinese firm behind the profiling, Zhenhua Data, has previously stated.

In the infamous case of Cambridge Analytica, where Facebook was expertly gamed to manipulate election results around the world, the practice was enabled by Facebook's settings. Cambridge Analytica's actions were against the terms of service, but Facebook cared about enforcing them only when controversy exploded.

We all know this data scraping and collating is happening, and the platforms have a duty to make it more difficult. That is not profitable for them, but it must be done.

It is a similar theme to the controversies when the Christchurch massacre was live streamed and shared to millions of viewers, and last week when sickos decided to embed a suicide video in TikTok videos targeting children.

None of this was the intention of the people who invented the platforms, but they are ultimately responsible for fixing the harmful and decidedly antisocial results of their creations.

In addition to profiling people, Zhenhua says its database can be used for "public opinion intervention" or the amplification of extreme social media voices to sow discord or spread disinformation.

"Anything can be turned into reality through social media," the company's website statedbefore it was taken offline following interest from Western media.

This is undeniably true, in an era where fake news has been shown to be just as believable to an electorally significant part of the population as properly sourced content.

Last week, a study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute found that China-founded TikTok is deliberately cultivating the feed of users around the world to favour a political and societal discourse that marries to the interests of the Communist Party, and filters out topics that go against it.

When debate is raging about the sense in imposing legislation to aid the survival of traditional media operations, at the expense of big tech platforms, revelations of the past week have provided a strong reminder of what happens when social media is left alone to tell the story of our world.