Rise of the Digital Lynch Mob
Black Anger, White Hostility, Public Shaming, Blame [Social] Media!
I hate to say it, but Gil Scott-Heron was mistaken when crooned “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” circa 1970.
Social media and the 24-hour news cycle are perfectly poised to quite literally, “televise the revolution.”
Over the past two-years, online social platforms have fed the public a continuous stream of negativity and propaganda centered high conflict stories that are often fueled with a racially polarized event. Social media has created a catalyst through which dissent can permeate ones personal living space.
This is a dangerous phenomenon.
The danger in social media is its’ indiscriminate ability to reach everyone in a superficial manner; because people tend to believe their own eyes! Take for instance a viral video clip showing a 3-minute encounter.
Video clips are subjective. They capture moments in time which may only highlight the most inflammatory segments of an event– that doesn’t mean the event wasn’t bad. But video clips selectively spoon-feed what people see, and most people don’t do any research to see if the clip is real, fake, or edited.
They just join the mob.
It’s the widespread permission the world has been given — behind the cloak of social media — to be mean, nasty, and downright inhumane about anyone and everything.
The Birth of the Mob
In or around 2007 Facebook began to experiment with an app on its’ platform called “Polls.” This app allowed any and everybody to create, share and participate in random polls about a myriad of subjects.
The polls were fun in the beginning; but then President Obama’s first presidential bid ensued and it was all down hill from there.
Racists, lunatics, hatemongers and rabble-rousers flocked to the comments sections of these controversial Polls to spar in a serious of verbal skirmishes. Back in ’07 is was the Conservative versus Liberals and it carried over to all the presidential rallies and town halls across the nation.
I too fell prey to the madness and jumped at the chance to linguistically trounce any witless hatemonger.
We all did, early on.
By 2008 when the presidential election was in full-swing, Polls that read,“Do you think Obama is a Muslim?,” began to crop up. That was the beginning of a social phenomenon I have coined “ The Digital Lynch Mob.”
At some point in time, Polls just ceased to exist. I surmised Facebook caught on the counterproductive nature of them and shut them down.
Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the Digital Lynch Mob from spreading like the plague.
What exactly is the Digital Lynch Mob?
The Digital Lynch Mob is essentially the onslaught of off-color commentary and nasty social trolling on a social media platform about a recent news headline. It’s those posts, tweets, and videos that spark the hate-filled barrage of comments directed at one person or group of people, around a specific point.
[Digital Lynch Mobs] are directly responsible for fueling the current climate of black anger and white hostility; because they literally leap out of cyberspace an into to the real world.
It’s the widespread permission the world has been given — behind the cloak of social media — to be mean, nasty, and downright inhumane about anyone and everything.
And rather than any real change being made in the community’s that need it the most, we have instead, an emerging widespread climate of anger, distrust of law enforcement, and hyper-activism that fuels the spirit of conflict in our society.
Digital Lynch Mobs are birthed and sustained from one viral video and controversial news story to the next.
Our job, as sentient beings?
Reject the rhetoric and believe your eyes, in person, not what you see online.
