Some will argue that social media has enriched our lives and some will despise it. One of its aspects is that it can be used to communicate to large groups of people (almost) without being mediated. Mediated. That word sounds familiar. The first five letters of that word form the word media and that is how politicians and others that had something they wanted to say very badly communicated their message before social media emerged. Of course there were protests but those didn’t happen every day and of course populists participated in debates and such but in a debate there is still less freedom in what you can and can’t say. If you were to say something based on loose facts or say something that is just not true, you could be asked questions on this fake information. Social media makes it easier because although you can also be pointed out on the fact that you are lying, an army of trolls is just around the digital corner to defend you. Besides, the ability of spamming people with your (untrue) message makes it harder to be proven wrong. If you say something often enough it kind of becomes the new truth for people.
Social
media also has some practical aspects that benefit populists and their
followers. Populists want to address the heartland of the people and the
ability to communicate to people directly by sending out a quick tweet of Facebook
posts fits their preferred way of communicating. Their message also remains
largely unmediated. It is not the media that speaks about them, it’s the
populists themselves that speak about themselves or critique others.[1]
Additionally, the spread of fake news is often not checked. I remember coming
across a picture of two refugees carrying two large grocery bags just outside a
building. The ‘news’ page explained that these refugees got two bags of
groceries for free. The article then related this to the fact that there are a
lot of Dutch families that are living with hunger and that it is unfair that
they have to pay for their food while ‘foreigners’ are getting ‘everything’ for
free. However, later I came across some kind of fact check page that explained
that this was a picture of indeed two refugees but they were not holding bags
of groceries, they were holding two bags containing the only belongings they
got left after fleeing form the war in Syria! To me this shows that social
media can be used to spread fake information quickly. The problem is that most
people already believe and want to believe that these fake messages are true and
therefore do not bother to check whether they are real. I guess the challenge
is to counter the spread of misinformation on social media without damaging the
freedom of speech.
[1] Engesser, Sven, Nicole Ernst, Frank Esser, and Florin Büchel. “Populism and Social Media: How Politicians Spread a Fragmented Ideology.” Information, Communication & Society 20, no. 8 (2017): 1109-126.
Hey, I want to add to your blog that a lot of these people tend to follow each other, which results in a bubble where this fake news is being shared over and over again. I have seen that in these “communities”, conventional news sources are labeled as biased and as having an agenda, furthering the distrust outside of the community.
I want to add to your post that it is more worrysome that large social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are enabling this behaviour. Especially Facebook has been brought to the forefront of this controversy again this week when they refused to delete a campaign post by Trump which was spreading fake news/lies about one of the Democratic presidential candidates Joe Biden (former vice president under Obama), as well as Mark Zuckerberg apparently having meetings with conservative and far right spokes people about a campaign about freedom of speech.