We certainly live in interesting times. For social media, the use and misuse
of a single communications channel may have just changed the course of the free
world. Which makes for even more interesting times.
I don’t know about you, but I could use a little less excitement.
In the recent 2016 U.S. election of Donald Trump, a concerted and strategic
social media arsenal was unleashed, one that the Democrats seem to have been
wholly unprepared for.
How is that? While we (yes I’m one) were busy laughing at people who watch
Fox News, a “network” whose news stories and celebrity-talking-heads have been
debunked time and time again,
the
last laugh was on us.
“Fake News” became facts, and fears became fuel, and fools became
leaders.
The new white house itself is
proud
of its reliance on “
alternative
facts,” which — although
Twitter has had a
ball with the notion — is scary as shit.
Many of us original bloggers (Y2K here) remember when
Ev Williams started Blogger
and began self-publishing around that time. When Ev started Twitter, I don’t
think any one of us ever saw the future: A POTUS spreading
fallacies and
threats and
rumors,
and then drawing dangerous lines in the sand with enemies and allies alike, all
in 140 characters or less.
How did a medium that once was, if anything, super honest and highly personal
— with early bloggers and twitter users making themselves vulnerable and human
in sharing from the gut — become
a
channel for hate, hyperbole and falsehoods?
The medium isn’t the message, folks. The messengers are.
In this case, the
alt-right’s
Bannon and company ran a
brilliantly
strategic social media campaign, complete with a literal
paid
island of young people manufacturing a
digital
arsenal of fake new stories that made them rich, along with paid trolls
posted at every corner of every comment section that mattered.
Bannon thought of that. We didn’t.
Because at our core, liberals and progressives believe that no one would
believe it, that people are intelligent enough to distinguish hyperbole and
alternate facts from truth, and that in the end, we should believe the best
about our fellow man, and that love should trump hate.
Boy were we wrong. DEAD wrong.
So, how should we take back social media? Can we? What would it take? Do we
have to fight “fire with fire,” as Trump said last week about national
security?
While I’m glad we are building an army of comedians like
Alec
Baldwin and the SNL cast, who is building our army of truth-tellers that
can deprogram and sway a public that has already been captured by an army of
trolls?
One sign of hope this week: the ALT-rogue twitter movement
When the National Parks twitter users were silenced by federal order, some
brave
rangers went rogue and launched their own
“AltUSNatParkService” handle.
Scientists (@ScienceMarchDC) who have been directed to run all findings through
the new administration before publishing them have followed suit with a planned
march
on Washington and bevy of rogue twitter handles of their own.
Suddenly the Alt-ROGUE movement is rising up against the Alt-Right
movement.
This week – I see it as our best hope.
But we’ll need more. A lot more.
