The communication reach of social media through smart phone, both spatially and temporally, has been a cause of great concern to regimes that want to suppress news lest they spread disaffection among citizens to the detriment of the authority. The example of Tunisia and Egypt where people’s power overthrew the governments through street demonstrations in 2010 using social media and came to be known as ‘Arab Spring’ made governments with autocratic and despotic nature very wary. It is, therefore, no surprise that these governments with leaders clinging to power for decades have taken measures, legal and extra legal, to ensure that social media is kept under leash or muzzled altogether. These measures take the form of laws and regulations that greatly circumscribe the scope and content of social media, particularly news.
In extreme cases autocratic governments may take steps to severe the internet connection to all mobile and social media users. In Bangladesh the autocratic government that has just been overthrown used all these measures to prevent social media from conveying actual news in contrast to managed or censored news. It passed Digital and Cyber Security Acts aimed at muzzling critical voices or specifying the limits of expression which can be crossed on pain of imprisonment. Quite a few intellectuals and journalists faced criminal prosecutions for remarks in social media that were mildly critical of the government. The most blatant example of restricting social media in the dissemination of news or preventing its use by political activist was seen during the month-long street demonstrations by students in July this year. At the height of the movement the government shut down both broadband internet and mobile internet so that the anti-discrimination movement (it turned into anti-autocratic and anti-fascist movement at the end) launched by the students could not be co-ordinated by the organisers communicating through social media. From 17 July to 27 July there was no internet service in the country while Broadband remained shut down from 18 to 23 July. Though the government cited fire in the Data Centre as the cause for the disruptions, it transpired later that internet was deliberately disconnected to weaken the popular movement. The shutdown of Broadband caused heavy economic damages and unavailability of mobile internet put users to great disadvantage. In addition to shutdowns in July, mobile internet was shut down for 7 hours on August 2 and broadband from 11 am on August 5, the day the autocratic government fell. Prior to this, on 4 August the mobile internet was shut for a few hours. All these measures show the desperation of the unpopular government to scuttle the movement through denial of access to social media by the leaders of the movement. Even with occasional disruptions, social media played a crucial role at different stages of the movement that ultimately led to the downfall of the autocratic government on August 5.
GOOD SIDE: The anti-capitalist movement in the West, particularly in America, that was embodied in ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement in 2011 basked in the popularity and ubiquity of social media. The rise of ‘hashtag activism’ (a term coined in a 2011 article in Guardian newspaper of London) strongly incorporated social protests of various kinds. Hashtag activism, using identifiable phrases, drove digital (social media) activism across the globe. Through this programme activists’ target group of audience found minute by minute social media updates aggregating all posts that use that phrase ( e.g. Occupy Wall Street). Groups use their hashtags to spread information, to share photos of a protest or to livestream an act of injustice in real time and encourage their audience to share the videos. Examples of hashtag activism abound. In Nigeria, after 376 school girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014, women’s group used # BringBackOurGirls hashtag movement. In America, # BlackLivesMatter called attention to the plight of black people facing racist police brutality on daily basis.
Less dramatically, social media plays a significant role in creating a space for freedom of expression in all countries where it is restricted or banned. To do this, users of social media resort to many clever ways, including use of code words. In China where social media is banned, members of young generation use ‘underground’ methods to circumvent government surveillance. When US secretary of state was asked why Israel is doing so badly in public relations in the context of the war in Gaza he said without hesitation that Hamas and Palestinians had a greater advantage in projecting their case to the international community through social media. This then is the ‘good’ about social media that it creates a space for freedom of expression that may lead to regime change in autocratic countries or greater liberalisation in governance through reforms. The Gaza example, on the other hand, points to its potential power in reaching out to international community by people suffering from oppression, torture and wanton killings.
Among the most recent use of social media as a powerful tool of protest and organising a social movement is taking forward the feminist movement in what has been described as the Fourth-Wave. Online blogosphere paved the way for a fresh generation of nuanced and savvy feminist discourse and activism. Comprised mostly of millennial ( who came of age in 2000) and ‘Generation Z’ ( born between mid -1990s and mid- 2000s). Fourth- Wave feminists were shocked to see gender relationship still unequal and decided to fight for justice online with feminist articles as well as Twitter ( now X).They live-Twitted and live-streamed their protest on social media like Facebook. The #MeToo movement is another example of Fourth- Wave feminism using hashtag activism. Originally set up in America as a movement for underprivileged sexual assault survivors by black feminists in 2006, the Twitter manifestation of #MeToo brought public awareness over the extent of sexual assault and demanded that perpetrators of this offence be held to account. Since 2017 the #MeToo movement has become global and many important male personalities have been exposed and held accountable. The #MeToo movement became so influential in popular culture that Time magazine chose ‘the silence breakers: the voice that launched a movement’ as its 2017 ‘Person of the Year’.
BAD SIDE: Under the head ‘bad’ of social media use are instances where news is carried without checking facts carefully, acting on the spur of the moment. There is no malevolence behind such ‘ fake news’ and no great damage is done by its spread. The bright side of this type of ‘bad’ use of social media is that before long these news are shown to be what they are— false. A case in point is the recent instance of a female student being allegedly abducted by some people in the evening in Dhanmondi residential area in Dhaka where she was managing traffic in the absence of police after the July movement of the students. The news of ‘kidnapping’ spread like wildfire in no time in social media. Soon the same media dispelled the suspense and fear over the ‘incident’, informing users that the parents of the girl had forcibly taken her away in their car as she was overworking and not returning home even after repeated requests by them. The promptness with which the rumour in social media posing as news was quashed made the fake news anodyne and innocuous. A similar and more serious fake news made the rounds in social media during the July movement showing two female students participating in street songs that carried the news about their deaths in police firing. When many became inconsolable at the tragic news and were grief stricken fact checkers revealed that the girls were alive and well. It is difficult to say if news about their deaths were intended to incite student demonstrators or if it was a lapse of careful scrutiny. Most probably rumour helped the fake news to spread and the intent was nothing diabolical. This is a common risk about news updates in social media regarding an ongoing movement. Another example of similar fake news in social media based on wrong information and spread on the spur of the moment goes back to 2018 when in the height of the anti-quota movement of students one social media user cried out in pain hearing about her friends having been killed in the street by police fire. Here too, the mistake was discovered soon and the fake news did not spread far and wide, fanning the flame of violence. Band musician Rahul Anand’s house near 32 Dhanmondi was burnt to ashes after the July movement. The news that arsonists were behind this immediately became viral. Later it was learnt that it was a collateral damage of fire at Road 32, next door. These type of news in social media are called ‘bad’ because they are fake but not bad enough to be ‘ evil’ in intent.
EVIL PART: When fake news, posts or remarks in social media have malevolence and ill will behind them they become evil. The examples of using social media for evil purposes are plenty and the perpetrators range from ordinary criminal-minded to celebrities with twisted minds. To quote the most recent examples of fake news of evil nature Elon Musk referring to race riots in UK in July-August (2024) wrote in his X account, ‘civil war in UK was inevitable’. Given his status as a celebrity tycoon and owner of social media X this post went viral and added fuel to the fire of riot. This is pure evil, by any account. After October 7 incursion into Israel and killings of civilians by Hamas militants in 2023, Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu alleged that Hamas had beheaded babies during the carnage, showing grainy pictures. This was not corroborated by others and Israeli propaganda machine stopped mentioning the news. The original intent of the audio-visual news shared in social media was obviously to spread and deepen hatred against Hamas. Very recently in August, former president Trump and billionaire Elon Musk joined hands and warned the trade union United Auto Workers against resorting to strikes in tweets in X. This violation of rights of workers through intimidation in social media is an act of evil and demonstrates the seamy side of the role of the media. For quite some time, the YouTube is flush with news on war in Ukraine and Gaza, most of which are fake. The intention being to attract maximum viewers on commercial ground, these are not evil in nature, however irresponsible these may be. So, one has to be careful about classifying fake news into simply fake and therefore ‘bad’ or fake tilting towards ‘ evil’.
Other world: Discussion so far has focussed on news only. But many more things take place in the internet superhighway than breaking news in social media and news channels. As netizens, users of social media can roam around this superhighway for virtual participation in various cultural and intellectual events. Some of these events may reverberate in social media later or in real time. In the realm of the virtual, the distinction between strictly social media and various events in the internet network is blurred. So, after a brief review of the good, bad and the evil in social media one can take a brief walk around the net world to see what is good, bad and evil inhabiting there. One soon discovers that the realm outside strictly social media is not only varied but it is vast as well. Only some of these can be touched upon in this brief review.
Literary activities have become very popular online, particularly after Covid outbreak when people had to remain indoors and physically cut off from rest of society. It is seen that writers, both established and beginners, take advantage of wide readership available through internet and publish their poems, short stories and serialised novels in their account in social media as well as online magazines. Literary meetings and readings of individual writer’s work are recorded online that have wide coverage. Sometimes interviews of prominent thinkers and literary figures are presented in social media as well in web platforms for the benefit of those who are interested. Spanning the intellectual and the aesthetic, internet users like U-tube bring musical events like Glyndeborne classical music festival in UK or Mozart festival in Salzburg, Austria to the screen in user’s mobile for their enjoyment at leisure. Likewise, they can be virtual visitors to world famous art museums like Louvre (Paris), Prado (Madrid), Tate modern in London or Guggenheim museum in New York to look at masterpieces of Tintoretto, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Da Vinci, Vermeer, Monet, Van Gogh, Chezane, Dali, Picasso, Matisse, Miro, Pollock and all the other big names in art history. There is only ‘good’ about these online experiences. But online fare also offer video games, pornography and gambling. The first is patently ‘bad’ because most of them make violence appear as tame and banal. But the remaining two are pure evil, contributing as they do to moral decadence and psychic disorder bring on through addiction. Exploitation of children for immoral purposes in social media and online platforms has made them abhorrent and evil in the eyes of guardians of public morality. Recently Mark Zuckerberg had to undergo lengthy hearing in US senate for the erotic content in Facebook that enticed girls of minor age.
A whole book can be written on the good, bad and evil in social media and the internet superhighway. What has been covered here is just the tip of the iceberg.
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