Social media: the new News platform

I spend a fair amount of time with political activists and there are a lot of things that people in these groups say that I disagree with but recently the one I’ve been thinking about most is this:

That traditional news outlets have been superseded by social media. That they are archaic and surplus to requirements now.

This terrifies me because these are educated and somewhat informed people. These people are interested in the goings on of the world. These are not people who flip straight to tits on page 3.

You can definitely make an argument that readers of the Sun are not going to suffer from the lack of journalistic integrity which comes with getting information from social media, but these are not those people.

Patrick Cockburn said of the Arab Spring ’Many members of the intelligentsia in Libya and Syria seemed to live and think within the echo chamber of the internet. Few expressed practical ideas about the way forward.’ and that’s exactly what I’m concerned about most.

The idea that social media is at all a platform you should encourage people to trust in the integrity of is insane. The rise of social media has created a medium for extremist sites to flourish that would in days gone past have been sued into the ground — but when there are a thousand voices with slick HTML 5 web 2.0 homepages saying Obama is a muslim, you can’t go after all of them.

Social media allows for emotionally driven narratives to spread without any checks or balances. It allows people to tailor what they see to suit their fantasy storylines and it fosters extremism on all sides of any dispute. The algorithms that selectively show you only content you engage in directly cuts out opposition opinions. In Libya, the story of mass rape by government forces was widely covered, with a claim of proof being a survey of 60,000 women. So far, every human rights group has failed to find any first-hand evidence to support this story. Traditional media holds a degree of blame for the publication of the story, but social media is the more significant vector through which these kind of stories are spread. Social media will always spread the days most inflammatory story and push it to swathes of people who won’t see the two dozen other more moderate pieces, resulting in that single light being lit on a multi-faceted conflict.

The claim has often been made that because of social media we have more social discussion now, and the strides that we’ve made forward in recent years in gay rights and… well, actually, that’s the only thing of any consequence that you can make the case for.

Feminism has been pushed further mainstream in recent years, undoubtably somewhat due to social media influence, but there’s also been a large push back against that due to perceived extremism — extremism coming from a small minority of people that were given a voice through social media and became so extreme in their implementation of feminist philosophies due to the ability in social media platforms to encase yourself in a social bubble, cutting out any dissenting views.

There have been steps forward, certainly, but none so significant that I think you could accredit them to anything other than the standard progression of women’s rights that has been ticking over for decades in the west. Social media became the medium through which the anti planned-parenthood video was spread through last year. Content that one can only describe as propaganda, near entirely empty of truth. That video would never have been given airtime on traditional television without a viral history online to back it up. Say what you want about Fox News — and believe me I have a lot to say — but I think even they wouldn’t have gone that far.

Without social media it is very unlikely that such large-scale radicalisation could occur so swiftly, from the far right anti-government US terrorists to the Sunni extremism fostered internationally by groups like ISIS.

‘Half of jihad is media’ is a quote that supposedly appeared on jihadist websites, and seems to be a fairly apt phrase in relation to the radicalisation that the sunni world has seen in recent history.

Despite all of the above, there’s no point in being a luddite and so all we can do is look on and hope that the human will for survival proves to be stronger than our ever-improving methods of self destruction.