Weaponised intelligence and TikTok horror shows harm of social platforms

As Australians woke on Monday morning and read about the industrial scale of personal information harvesting being conducted on influential citizens on behalf of Chinese intelligence agencies, via social media and other online sources, it added another layer 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 thousands of citizens around the world, and also to use the data to seed divisive misinformation campaigns overseas across various social platforms.

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

While a CEO or politician may feel like they are simply giving their followers an appealing dash of personal charm by making 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 to pull together data points and map their contacts in alarming detail.

That is not to say that people must remove themselves from social media, rather that 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 heads up that 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 of data from big platforms like Facebook is against the terms of service, and it has sought to take action against some companies, like Australian social media marketing platform Stackla, when it believes it is occuring, but it doesn't mean that they are collectively doing enough to stop this kind of activity.

"Ninety percent 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 entirely enabled by Facebook's settings. Cambridge Analytica's actions were against the terms of service, but Facebook only cared about enforcing them when controversy exploded.

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

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

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

In addition to profiling high profile people, Zhenhua claims 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 stated, before it was taken offline due to the recent Western media media interest.

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

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 quietly filters out topics that go against it.

At a time 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, the week has provided a strong reminder of what happens when social media is left alone to tell the story of our world.