Tag Archives: Social Media

A Phobia of Hate (part one of a rant)

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It used to be the case that when writing an essay or presenting an argument, the writer needed to define one’s terms. This way, parameters were set with clarity and, as we say these days, transparency about what was to be discussed. Sadly, this seems not to be the case any more. I don’t blame social media for this; it seems to me politicians have largely led the charge, using terms with usually clear definitions in ways that suit their own purpose, without any regard for that common understanding. Rarely do they make clear that this is what they are doing. The mainstream media are inclined to do the same. What we may think they’re talking about, they may not be. Perhaps both politicians and the media learned the trick from Christian commenters who are happy to change the meaning of words as they see fit (‘Atheists’, ‘myth’, ‘metaphor’ for example.)

I dealt with autism here. The term, and diagnosis, is now stretched so thinly that, according to the social scientist who first proposed the autistic ‘spectrum’, it has become ‘meaningless’. What other terms have been misapplied until they too have been rendered ‘meaningless’?

How about phobia? Strictly speaking a phobia is an irrational fear, one for which there is no real basis: arachnophobia, agoraphobia, claustrophobia, for example. Of course there may be real grounds for being fearful of spiders (some are poisonous) heights (if perched precariously on the top of a mountain) and enclosed spaces (if it is suffocating), but the terms arachnophobia, acrophobia, claustrophobia are reserved, or at least they used to be, for those whose fear is extreme and above and beyond the rational. The term phobia is now applied to anyone who expresses concern about or criticism of any movement or cause: homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia come to mind. The first of these started life as an irrational fear that one might oneself be homosexual. Now it’s considered to be, by those who attribute their not ‘getting on’ in life or being subjected to personal criticism, to be the result of their being gay. Certainly ill-considered remarks may be unkind, a word that more than adequately describes much of what is described as phobic in modern society. But being unkind does not equate with a phobia, nor is it against the law. Not yet anyway.

Similarly offensive, a word originally that originally signified a physical attack, the meaning it still carries in law. As Paul Simon once expressed it in a rather pleasant little song, ‘One Man’s Ceiling is Another Man’s Floor’: what I might find offensive, in the sense of hurt feelings, is not necessarily what you find offensive, unless you choose to allow it to be. That’s because ‘offence’ in the slack modern sense is ridiculously subjective: it is, it seems, not a problem to call for the death of Jews but it is offensive to show images of an ancient ‘prophet’. Touchy religious sensibilities, sometimes prone to take offence at the slightest provocation, do not signal a criminal or even a criminal offence. And yet that is where we’ve got to, certainly in the UK. Remember your mother teaching you that sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt you? Of course this is not entirely true; words can cause emotional hurt. But this doesn’t mean those who use words critically merit investigation by the officers of the law.

Hate is a verb. Unlike its antonym love, it cannot also be a noun. I know, this is pedantic of me, but we’re talking about words and the damage they can cause when misapplied. To alter and stretch their meaning out of all recognition results in the problems we now have in (British) society. All of the accusations of ‘hate’ that fly around these days are, grammatically, ‘hatred’ though in fact, they rarely qualify as this either. According to Merriam Webster, hatred is ‘an extreme dislike or disgust or ill will or resentment that is usually mutual: prejudiced hostility or animosity.’ Hatred is a powerful, destructive emotion. Reasoned opposition to the political manoeuvring of minority groups is not really it.

Of course it is possible to take such opposition to extreme lengths that it may look a lot like hatred, but by and large it is not. I do not ‘hate’ religious group that try to impose their beliefs and practices on me or my society, but I do oppose them and their efforts. I also oppose those who claim that any opposition to their efforts constitutes ‘hate’. It rarely does so, but how convenient it is for those who don’t get their own way to have the accusation in their armoury. Which is not to say real hatred isn’t expressed, often in violent action, but strangely, as a society, we seem less concerned with such action. We are, apparently, required to understand the frustrations of those carrying them out; their grievance is genuine and heartfelt. Hurty words though are of much more concern.

 

Policing Social Media?

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I wrote this post in the middle of March, just before Don pitched Camp here, as a follow up to this post. Since then, the issues I address in it have moved on at an alarming rate. I’ve revised it to reflect these developments.

Who watches the watchmen? Should those who take it upon themselves to define what we are allowed to say or view be the same as those who police what we say and view? 

I’m not arguing for the protection of those who post abusive, hateful or libellous comments online. There is no place for racism, misogyny or homophobia in life and there are already laws for dealing with them. There is no reason they should not get a free pass on social media either. The question remains, however, who should be responsible for monitoring hate speech and either preventing or removing it. The same question needs to be asked of those comments that are considered, by whoever is going to decide these things, ‘harmful’ or constituting ‘misinformation’. Should the same official bodies that determine what is abusive, harmful or ‘misinformative’ be responsible for the actual censoring? This it seems to me, would be disastrous; the kind of thing that goes on in Russia, China and North Korea, not the ‘free’ west.

Nevertheless, let’s take look at the likely candidates for the role:

Governments. Should a government department regulate social media? As far as I’m aware, no such department exists in the UK or US at present. Governments themselves have, arguably, better things to do than monitor social media. Neither do they have the skills nor objectivity to exercise new, radical powers of censorship. It would be far too easy for them to decide that anything critical of their policies or actions is hate speech (or harmful or misinformation). In any case, as we’ve seen during the pandemic, governments already have far too much control of our lives.

The Police. The police have neither the resources nor manpower to monitor all that is said online. In the UK they don’t have sufficient manpower to intercept the many paedophiles operating online, let alone to monitor the comments of billions of ordinary folk. and haven’t they enough serious crime to be dealing with? 

Social media companies. Their algorithms have, so far, largely failed to eliminate abuse, while responding with unseemly zeal to blocking and barring perfectly innocent comments because of the presence of the odd trigger word. There simply aren’t enough humans to regulate comment, nor are social media companies in the business of deciding what is harmful or misinformative (though Patheos recently ousted bloggers who wrote anything critical about religion.) Governments may occasionally express their displeasure that companies are not doing more, but it’s difficult to see how they can. The slippery Sir Nick Clegg (behind Mark Zuckerberg in the picture), former UK MP and now second-in-command at Facebook, is not, as an establishment millionaire, the man for the job.

Users themselves. It isn’t realistic to think all users could be self-censoring. Many are not, nor are they ever going to be. Those with more extremist views, who have been blocked or banned by the popular social media companies, gravitate towards other sites, or create their own, that allow and even encourage such views (say ‘hi’ to QAnon, Breibart etc.) There is no moderation, in every sense of the word, on such sites (unless of course you happen to disagree with them, in which case you’re swiftly booted off.)

What to conclude? That governments have lost control of social media? Yes.  Though I would argue that control was never theirs to take. They’ve come late to the party and find, despite their gate-crashing attempts with new ‘misinformation’ laws, that they’re not being allowed in. Ultimately, however, these new laws are meaningless; a law that cannot be enforced is no law at all.

However…

Since I wrote this post, the UK’s Culture Secretary, the befuddled Nadine Dorries, has decided she wants to regulate streaming services, including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+, lest they make available to paying adults content that might be regarded as ‘harmful’. If she is successful in having her bill pass into law, the government’s own media watchdog, Ofcom, will be able to force streamers to filter (out) what they provide in the UK, just as they have to do in China. It’s as if the late Mary Whitehouse finally won*. This is not what democratic governments are for.

* Mary, for my readers in the U.S., was a self-appointed guardian of public morals, not unlike your very own Monica Coles.

The More Things Change…

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This year it’s Black Lives Matter. Last year it was Extinction Rebellion. Before that #MeToo, GM crops and gun control. Every year it seems there’s a new cause for us to take to the streets, or, if we can’t be bothered doing that, to social media where we can make our feelings known. Of course, the common people – you and I – have a voice. We have greater means of expressing it, more platforms on which to exercise it, than have ever existed before. No-one in history has had the means we have to express our outrage, opinions and grievances.

But so what? Whether we take to the streets, vlog, blog or tweet, the result, it seems to me, is the same: things stay pretty much as they are. Hardly anything changes as the result of our outcry and protest. Maybe a few statues are demolished, a handful of sexual predators jailed, but ultimately there’s no lasting change. Perhaps a tokenistic law is created, maybe the media involve themselves for a short time in the issue of the day, but before very long everything reverts to the way it was: black lives are no more improved, the police go back to their former ways of behaving (once no-one’s looking any more), children continue to be abused, the environment is still in crisis, there’s another mass shooting by an idiot who’s bought a gun too easily and politicians carry on acting as if they’re above the law. There’ll be a new cause to excite ourselves about next summer. And another the year after that. Today’s preoccupation will disappear just as quickly as the latest fashion or pop sensation.

Why is this, and  why are we largely ignored when we take to the streets or campaign on social media about the things that concern us? Why does our voice count for so little? We live in democracies don’t we, here in Europe and in the States; we have a right to be heard, to be listened to and be taken into account – don’t we?

Well, no. We don’t. No-one is obliged to listen to us. They don’t even have to pretend to, unless they’re politicians running for election and then they are only pretending. Even then we don’t really have the choice we think we do; we’re told we can vote for the candidate of our choice, but we can’t; choice is so severely restricted it’s hardly qualifies as a choice at all. We vote for whoever the parties have put up for us to vote for; for a package that dresses either to the left or the right, without nuance or balanced consideration of the issues, and very often with no long term view of what we need to survive and flourish. That’s why so many fail to vote; they know intuitively that the more things change, the more they stay the same – so why bother?

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The rest of us dutifully select from an already selected few: the millionaires, billionaires, career politicians and failed businessmen who claim they have our best interests at heart, who say they can manage us and make our country great again. Once they have power they forget about us – their lives are so far removed from ours that they can’t possibly relate to the way we ordinary people live – and what the most vocal of us say we want. We think we won’t get fooled again, as the Who say in their politically astute song, but of course we will: we are fooled again, and again and again. Every time.

To be continued.