It is worthwhile to ask what the role of media, social media or traditional, is when extreme individuals on the fringes are empowered to cause us all to destruct each other.
Not to mention the sections of the traditional or social media that have been experimenting with how much they can anger people against vulnerable groups without quite printing death threats in the paper. Or just, you know, casually advocating the end of rule of law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemies_of_the_People_(headlin...
There are a lot of people in the West who, while they would refrain from pulling the trigger themselves, would happily either advocate that someone else do so, or watch someone die, simply because they're Muslim. The example that comes to mind is Katie Hopkins calling for refugees to be machinegunned.
We have created conditions of perverse incentives in our media. We reward extremists. We reward unfounded accusations. We reward people saying wacko things. "If it bleeds, it leads."
We need to stop allowing the extremes to "wag the dog."
EDIT: This doesn't mean we should censor people. Rather, it means we need to become a little cynical and self aware of the mechanism of outrage virality itself.
Specifically, we need to stop mindlessly rewarding mass murderers with attention. We need to stop mindlessly rewarding people who act extreme for attention, period.
“[Social media] is like a game where you get 1 point for being fair and thoughtful and 1000 points for character assassination”
https://twitter.com/paultoo/status/1100144882872532992
This is partly why I spent so much time writing a media literacy guide to explain the incentives behind what we see in our feeds and our newspapers:
https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README....
If you regularly treat people you are friends with badly it is generally on you and people will choose to disengage from a relationship with you.
If you regularly behave in a destructive manner towards members of a real life group then you at some point run out of individuals in that group that will invite you to real life group gatherings.
This is exactly why sociopaths and psychopaths quickly run out of connections and have to move around a lot.
Counterpoint: the Republican Party in the US still has strong support amongst many people its policies end up hurting.
ISIS, Osama Bin Laden, Al Queda in Iraq, and every other effective terrorist org has telegraphed their intentions. STILL we have, time and again, fallen into the trap they set. It would be funny if it wasn’t so damn tragic.
Just curious, are you one of the people who would say that Pewdiepie has a role in this shooting and all the division as well?
The radical left call everyone that is effective at expressing any other opinion alt-right, which is where the unfounded and silly assertion that Pewdiepie is related to any of this comes from.
- using the N-word (more than once) - doing a nazi salute and dressing up in nazi garb - paying two Indians(?) to hold up a sign with 'death to all jews' on it.
On top of that he not only subscribes to quite a number of radical/far right people (Stefan Molyneux, Lauren Southern), but did a shout-out to a channel that is pretty far down the far-right side of the spectrum (E;R).
Then of course there's the fact that this support works two ways. The 'far right' really seems to like him a lot!
To be clear, I'm not saying he is a white supremacist, a racist, or even 'far right'. I'm really not. I can't read his mind, and obviously it's true that if one wants to troll, the above is a very effective approach.
(Although he could also, I dunno, mix it up by doing some far left stuff. Promote communism, make a Stalin shrine or guillotine the rich jokes. Or do any of many other things that are provocative that aren't as much associate with the far right. defend PHP?)
But the least that I would argue is that he's definitely not part of the middle that is 'caught' in between all this. Not in behavior, and not in effect. And in that context I don't care too much about intent (which we can never really know).
His users were creating some pretty irritating memes out of this tragedy and he took action to moderate things until things calm down.
Similar to Bin Laden's goal of bankrupting his enemies by luring them into never ending wars.