Engagement and Accountability in Your Community

Engagement and accountability with your community is the theme in this issue, and there is no denying that virtual communities are and will remain a significant political reality. Drawn together by common interests and philosophies, members of virtual communities share information and messages of support on web sites provided by companies that report tens of billions of dollars in annual profit. Since it has become evident that corporations like Facebook earn their profit from third parties, not from virtual community members themselves; have been unable or unwilling to prevent the spread of damaging deliberate misinformation content on their platforms; and in expanding their corporate value to third parties they have on several occasions violated the privacy of millions of their virtual community members; regulatory agencies in the European Union and United States have started taking action through fines and proposed regulation. It is crucial to ask whose community is being benefitted by social media, and to what extent are communities being harmed. Case in point: vaccination advice.