Whenever I hear someone attack the attackers they point the finger to the right wing trolls, but let’s be frank the right wing is typified by trolling. You don’t expect a Nazi to be nice, but the woke left who want social justice and human rights are playing with the same language.
This is clear, the left are just as bad as the right when it comes to online abuse, and in the left’s case it’s not excusable. If you promote peace and forgiveness you’d better be prepared to practice what you preach or else you just end up fuelling the sort of vicious spiral that saw Lisa Millar from the BAC ‘Breakfast Couch’ program quite Twitter in disgust.
The ABC is in an unenviable position because their charter stipulates they must be balanced. If this means giving air time to those on the right of the political spectrum then so be it, but there are thousands on the left WHO WILL NOT TOLERATE THIS. They criticise the ABC for even allowing people whose views are different from theirs to be on-camera, they attack journalists (most particularly in the context of Int’l Women’s Day, which was yesterday, female journalists), and they lower the tone for everyone allowing more bad language to proliferate.
You are responsible.
It’s not some nameless goon in a suit who profits from the hate, it’s people you celebrate because their views consone with yours. It’s not a big corporation that makes money out of the poor conduct, it’s you. Just stop it.
The thing with social media is that there’s no consequences for poor conduct. People use anonymous accounts and raise the bar to the highest pitch BECAUSE IT DOESN’T MATTER if someone disagrees with them. If they’re in a pub and start carrying on like a pork chop they might get floored by a punch in the nose, but not online. Online they can say precisely anything they want.
Putin can say anything he wants because there’re no consequences. Trump taught him how to bend the rules so far they threaten to break. Trump was nothing without Twitter, and when Twitter closed his account he stopped being a threat. Now that he’s back in the loop we’d better be careful.
But everyone has a way to stop the abuse, stop the lies, stop the spoken hate. We can all work to raise the tone of social media, but where’s the incentive. People “like” tweets that take the most extreme position, the platform celebrates hyperbole and ridicule, so how do we stop the rot? It’s up to all of us to take a private stand. Not because it’ll make us popular, but because it’s the right thing to do.
