Dubai: Social media platforms should consider imposing self-censorship tactics to limit the detrimental impact certain content has on the way governments and businesses are run, according to Michael Bloomberg, the American business magnate, politician, and philanthropist on the occasion of ‘Future Cities Forum, Dubai 2015’ event.

“The time it takes between taking over responsibility of a government, a company or a city and becoming accountable for it keeps shrinking due to the advent of social media. Until social media came about governments had a four-year mandate to deliver on their policies before they could fall prey to public criticism.

“Now, on your first day in office, 100,000 messages about you have already flooded social media,” said Bloomberg.

As a man who has run a successful media business and the world’s most famous city, a self-made billionaire with a net worth of $35.4 billion (Dh130 billion), Bloomberg must be taken seriously whenever he raises a subject or talks about an issue, especially when this is so close to the subject of his expertise.

He went on to add: “Social media is a two-way medium and you can’t always differentiate between who said what making it much more difficult to run a company or a country. Social media has changed the world — it is no longer the powers that control what is said.”

Interestingly, Bloomberg’s take on social media started as he was ending a brief reference to international terrorism and the “enormous anti-immigrant movements it has sparked across Europe and the US”.

My take on this is that Bloomberg was verbally expressing a subconscious ugly truth about social media and how it has played into the hands of Daesh fundamentalists who use it as a propaganda and recruitment tool to promote their agenda.

And you only need to think a few years back to bring to mind the fast and furious way in which the Arab Spring movement was born, incubated and spread from one end of North Africa to another, in order to understand the fear social media has inflicted upon the minds of governments.

Bloomberg’s suggestive comments already manifest themselves through increased government spending in resources and technological infrastructure to monitor conversations happening in social media to help them identify potential risks and threats to their sovereignty or security.

But what he means is rather different and potentially could mean the end of social media as we came to know it, like it or loathe it.

“Social media will end up censoring content,” he proclaimed verbatim. That’s a powerful statement from a powerful personality, but this is not a new debate. The difference is in the perspective.

Who’d be afraid of a bit of social media banter? An unscrupulous corporation and an authoritarian corrupt regime? Or a virtuous NGO and a benevolent government? Rather rhetoric, don’t you think?

So, how would this so called social media censorship be imposed, whose interests would stand to most likely serve? If the example of conventional media is anything to go by, then unfortunately, the future of social media is bleak.

Let’s take Bloomberg’s statement for granted on the assumption that he didn’t make his billions through pure coincidence but earned it due to his foresight and business acumen. What would social media platforms need to do to censor content and how would such a move impact their bottom-lines?

Firstly, they would have to somehow impose restrictions on what can be said or shared or ‘liked’ based on various parameters dictated by insecure governments and companies with poor reputations and low credibility. But if they are given the opportunity to do so, then every government and every business in the world would certainly like to leverage this privilege as a shield during a crisis.

If this were to happen, social media would effectively die a death as quick as their short-lived dominance has been because success was built on the feeling of empowerment to say what one wants, a freedom of speech and ability to influence others with one’s ideas, opinions and views that was never possible before.

In short, if Bloomberg is right — and he is seldom wrong — meaningful social media debates will soon become extinct.

Credit: The writer is Head of PR and Social Media at the Al-Futtaim Group and author of ‘Back to the Future of Marketing – PRovolve or Perish’