FOR the last few years of my formal working life, I was employed in the newsroom of a medium-size, well-established paper. It was a happy experience in a non-hierarchic, team-orientated environment and a relief after working with the inflated egos of a university campus. My activities were various and very fulfilling, but my core job was letters editor.
Twitter and WhatsApp were still in their infancy in those days and the paper’s postbag was full. We tried to run as many readers’ contributions as possible and most days used columns on both the editorial and feature page with more general letters elsewhere on occasion. Letter writers responded to published news and initiated debate about community concerns and local issues.
But the editorial hand was firm and every published letter was subject to discussion. One purpose was to decide whether anything newsworthy was on offer; but the main reason was the gatekeeper function. The paper had a moral and professional obligation to keep contributions within clearly defined boundaries determined by the law, press regulations and social responsibility. The purpose of letters was dialogue and debate within civilised norms. Letters were immediately binned if they contained falsehood or incited intolerance and worse; or simply if they contributed nothing worthwhile. My job came to a premature end with a couple of years to go as part of a general collapse of the newspaper industry, which continues ten years later. Journalism is fast disappearing as a career.
Instead, we have social media. New technologies are never greeted with intelligent responses but with wild unthinking optimism. This one was supposed to herald the dawn of a new age of democracy and was even received with enthusiasm in our newsroom by people who should have known better; and were later to lose their livelihoods as a consequence. The Arab Spring was credited to social media as if revolutions had never occurred before and in any case it proved illusory. Since then, social media has proved an increasingly powerful tool for right-wing populism and was certainly a major factor in the rioting by fascist mobs in Britain this month. As Richard Fern puts it, ‘Hate is clickbait. And social media algorithms put it on steroids.’[1]
In the newsroom, whatever we accepted for printing was understood as publication subject to rigorous standards relating to potential benefit and harm. It has been largely missed, or deliberately ignored, that an individual with a smart phone is also in the publication business with a far greater reach in terms of audience, distance and impact than an old-fashioned print newspaper. Yet it is assumed by a majority of users that they can broadcast exactly what they please and this assumption has been seized upon by people with evil intent. There is clearly an enormous market for fake news and propagandists have long known that the bigger the lie and the more often it is broadcast, the greater its impact.
The last twelve months has been a better passage for democracy than had been feared. Election outcomes in Poland, the Czech Republic, France, Britain, South Africa and even Venezuela have been positive; although the biggest is yet to come in the USA. Meanwhile vicious autocrats in Russia, China, Iran and North Korea continue to flex their muscles and make their intentions clear: to diminish democracy wherever they can. Everywhere in the democratic world they have their many little helpers whittling away at freedom, not least here in South Africa.
Now we can add to their numbers the bosses of social media. As a whole they seem unwilling to curb the use of their products, presumably because of the money they make. The most notorious, Elon Musk described by journalist Andrew Donaldson as a ‘pasty-faced man-child’ (a description that might be applied to many neo-fascists) uses his own product to gleefully forecast civil war in Britain. He is destined to be disappointed and clearly has no understanding of British history, which is peppered with periodic riots, but no civil war since the seventeenth century. Those who are upholding the law and justice he calls ‘woke stasi’. Masquerading as an advocate of free speech Musk has fired Twitter moderators and re-enabled the purveyors of poison. This is not simply permissive, but promotional. Through their words he and other right-wingers implicitly support the drunken louts with hate-filled faces who terrorised British streets for several days.
Carole Cawalladr, the leading British journalist on right-wing influence perpetrated by the Internet, argues that this was Musk’s rehearsal for a possible Trump electoral defeat in the US. She points out that rioting in Britain is defined by bricks and broken chair legs; but that in America militias and the ownership of automatic weapons are legal. Musk’s goal, she says, ‘is chaos. And it’s coming.’[1]
Nearly five hundred people have been charged and punitive sentences are already being handed out, not just for rioting (affray in quaint British legal terminology) but also online incitement. There is a strong possibility of terrorism charges being brought: what else is a march of thugs smashing windows, setting fire to buildings such as shops and libraries and to vehicles, and threatening people ‒ but terrorism? And it chimes with an assessment made at least ten years ago that the main terrorist threat to Britain was internal and derived from right-wing populism. Since then, Brexit has pulled more people into the world of right-wing fantasy.
Not much of this is entirely new, but the reach of hatred has multiplied manyfold. Prominent people in any mainline activity – politics and sport, for instance – are subject to vile and hateful abuse that includes threatened physical assault. When Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, said recently that the law was totally inadequate to control the online abuse and fakery of social [sic] media he was not just talking about Britain.
One well-informed commentator recently voiced the opinion that social media posed a greater threat to humankind than climate change. It is about to get even worse with artificial intelligence (or should it be artificial stupidity given that it is based on the contents of the Internet?) threatening to destroy the concept of truth and authenticity for good.
Perhaps we are only now beginning to grasp the real nature of an Orwellian society, the deeply symbiotic relationship between technology and authoritarianism. Can legislation possibly keep up with technological change and the evil minds that control and seek to exploit it? It is unconscionable that a medium with such power should be owned by individuals richer than many small nations. This is why corporate fines have no future, although individual responsibility might have some impact. Add to this the warped egos of many in the computer world. The equivalent in the print era was Rupert Murdoch, but he has been constrained to a significant extent by the law. We are now in a totally different world, effectively lawless and increasingly out of control.
It is hard to see any way forward other than something totally radical. Social media need shutting down, their ownership and management vested in properly regulated public bodies and their use subject to strict controls equivalent to the days of print. The alternative, one fears, is a world literally run by the purveyors of hatred and fakery.
[11 Carole Cadwalladr in the Observer, 18 August 2024.
[2] Richard Fern, ‘Online propagandists know it’s their audience that matters most’ Daily Maverick 168, 10 August 2024.