Have you also seen the Tweet with that short clip in which “Borat” star Sacha Baron Cohen gives the Social Media industry, and especially Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, a blast? Below the Tweet with the video:
‘If Facebook were around in the 1930s, it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads’ — Listen to ‘Borat’ star Sacha Baron Cohen slam the social media industry for facilitating the spread of hate, lies, and conspiracies pic.twitter.com/U2eO2kMZbz
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) October 21, 2020
That makes you think about “freedom of speech” as we want to know or understand it. The “normal” soul, that is. At the same time, of course, you can ask yourself what “normal” is.
Sometimes I am very happy with my selective scrolling through timelines on Social Media. I seem to find a certain keyword (or several) from every published post, which either arouses my interest or, on the contrary, not. I have to admit that I almost always seem to be looking for something interesting, but I personally take very little part in the conversations or debates that take place there.
The crazier the conversations, the less I follow them. What’s called: I stay far away from it. I have a reasonable view of the world for myself, if I say so myself. I like to keep that image anyway. It offers me something to hold on to in these somewhat unstable times, so to speak. I finally found something I never knew I was looking for.
I therefore agree with Cohen, that Social Media often offers that formidable possibility to spread hatred, lies and conspiracy theories. But let’s face it, just to get back to that “normal” thing, most of what I read and the people I follow are not concerned with that at all. Not at all. And it brings me a lot of pleasure when I see that others who are diametrically opposed to this, not only question such behavior on Social Media, but also make fun of it.
Of course it’s pretty scary when the bunch of people who do hate, spread lies and the rest are offered an easy-peasy stage. Somewhere you might want them to disappear from this planet, but it doesn’t work that way. After all, it has never worked like that. Previously, those people worked fairly underground. And now, knowingly and knowingly, they allow themselves to be identified very well, by means of an ID, account or whatever makes the Internet possible. I wonder, if that’s smart or stupid?
So for me the question remains: do we prefer to keep that hatred, lies and conspiracy theories underground or openly? So that we can go against it? Is it a clever bomb under our naive butt, or just stupid propaganda that we now know how to handle already?
Because we are all terribly afraid of change, but it would be better if it turns out that we have learned something from our history together.
And that we as “users” of that damned Social Media, our formerly underground “opponents”, can resist and withstand as much as possible. So that they can continue to row against the current on the left and we finally let them lose hope halfway through, laughing.
