In Oceania, citizens lack privacy, have little control over their daily lives, and learn only the information that the Party chooses to tell them. Today, by contrast, information flows freely through many forms of media. People can look up any topic at any time and read about it. Through various social network sites and through phone and text messages, people have never been so connected. However, the power of media can work against people as well as for them. Is all information true and accurate, or do some sources obscure truth and mislead readers? What are the potential abuses of constant connectedness? How might the screens, large and small, that surround us be used against us? Under what circumstances might our "information society" fall into the hands of a powerful but ill-intentioned group of leaders? Discuss the abuses of information and privacy in 1984 and the possibility of such abuses occurring today.

Not all information, despite the vast flood of it we have access to, is true and accurate. This problem has accelerated since the 1987 abolition of the Fairness Doctrine in the US, which had insured that news broadcasters aired contrasting views on controversial news of public interest in an honest and equitable manner. Once that rule was struck down, however, biased and one-sided news hit the airwaves—and many people did not realize that they might be only getting one side of the story from their favorite news station. Fox News became particularly notorious for this, often causing its devoted viewers to get a distorted picture of what was going on.
The rise of the internet and social media only accelerated the problem. These media provided more news than ever but also more fake news than before and offered little way to police it. Unscrupulous individuals who either wanted to sway elections or simply have their sites "go viral" so they could make money knowingly put out news that was completely false. One of the most famous cases was Pizzagate, in which in 2016 it was alleged that John Podesta, Hilary Clinton's campaign manager, and other high ranking Democratic officials were running a child sex trafficking operation out of a pizza shop called Comet Ping Pong in Washington DC. One man believed the stories, drove up from North Carolina, and shot into the restaurant. The story, which had gone viral on social media, was an utter lie, but it could have—and almost did—have lethal consequences.
Even for those with the best intentions, connectedness can lead to bad consequences. We tend to surround ourselves with people like us, who see the world through the same set of lenses, and this can lead to "confirmation bias," where our own beliefs, true or false, are constantly reinforced and alternative perspectives never enter our circle. Worse, advertisers, including political advertisers, can quickly profile people and feed them biased political information based on their "tribal" (political) affiliations.
A person like Mark Zuckerberg, who is by far the majority shareholder of Facebook, could potentially establish a dictatorship by controlling the algorithms that funnel news and information to us so that we only received the news he wanted us to hear. While Zuckerberg seems to have no interest in doing that, the possibility is out there that an unscrupulous person who got control of a major social media company could wreak havoc with democracy.
Unlike in Oceania, however, citizens here do have the option of partaking of a variety of news media to try to get a balanced picture. It makes sense to read and watch a variety of news sources and to step out of our comfort zones to confront people, ideas, and media that may challenge what we think we know is true. We should always double or triple source information from a variety of sources that represent different political views before we jump to conclusions.
In 1984, abuse of privacy occurs because the state is constantly spying on people and encouraging people—even children—to spy on their neighbors and report any deviance. This is already happening in some ways in our country as the NSA engages in domestic surveillance (as Edward Snowden exposed) and as a number of internet companies, but particularly Google and Facebook, "harvest" all sorts of data about us by tracking what sites we visit and what we say in public internet forums they control—whether we want them to or not. They do not have to ask permission from us to use our information under current law. Department stores have hidden mics in mannequins that record shopper comments—we have to assume, as in 1984, that we are always being surveilled. This surveillance can be benign—but it can also be abused as it by state in 1984.