Before I continue I must make a declaration. I do not use
Twitter and I have no wish to. It may be considered a suitable conduit to use
by some, to air their views, but I myself am not at all interested in whether
somebody had scramble eggs for tea, or a strangers opinion on the latest Dr Who
episode, although I do agree it is a good tool that allows many people to air
their views on subjects in very quick time and can be used for positive means.
However, the main conversation around Twitter is invariably
about the levels of abuse some people are faced with and the types of extreme
views that can often be read on it. Some feel that Twitter abdicates their
responsibility as a publisher by allowing abuse to be broadcast and do not
censor tweets that contain examples of racism, sexism, homophobia and misogyny.
But it is not Twitter’s responsibility to act as the worlds censor. Twitter's
only responsibility, if a crime is committed, is to aid the police fully whilst
they conduct their inquiries. After all, even if a Twitter account is deleted,
each tweet has a unique identifier and can still be traced.
Normally, examples of abuse make the headlines when a
‘celeb’ has been abused, an obvious example being when a man was arrested for
making unpleasant comments about the dead father of the diver Tom Daly. The
police sprung into action and arrested a man for being nasty and unpleasant,
which I do not think is actually a crime at the moment, although I’m sure many
‘celebs’ would love to see it added to the statute book. The police, however,
are not as quick to act when a member of the public is abused and you get the
feeling that the level of justice received, and time devoted, is not based upon
the crime committed or the level of abuse, but by the public profile of the
alleged victim.
People are often surprised by the levels of hate witnessed
on Twitter and many attempt to portray it as just a small coterie of inadequate
and sad individuals banging away at keyboards in their bedrooms late at night.
They are described as ‘trolls’ or dismissed as ‘keyboard warriors’ in an effort
to reduce and pigeon hole them as losers. It is an attempt to diminish, because
people cannot accept the cold facts that most abusers are normal people, living
normal lives and ,‘celebs’ in particularly, cannot accept that they may be
disliked by some of their target
audience, so attempt to belittle anyone who is critical of them or their work.
I think it is probably a defence mechanism adopted to bolster their fragile
self esteem. This tactic of demean, deride and dismiss is encouraged within
most areas of the media, where journalists and broadcasters adopt an arrogant
and self serving approach, bordering on pomposity, towards online journalists
and it is also a variation on a tactic that was, and still is by some, used by
the majority of the public in order not to face the truth about paedophilia,
where they are happy to depict a paedophile as a dirty Mac wearing monster, out
on the street, when the unpalatable and statistically proven fact is that the
monster is probably already in the house.
This is also the case with most racists, homophobes, sexists
and women haters. They are not all sad individuals without any friends and poor
levels of hygiene but instead they are ‘the man down the pub’, they are
lawyers, call centre workers, builders, shop workers, they are husbands and
sons, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, a case in point being the two
men that were found guilty last year of online abuse of the ex-footballer Stan
Collymore. The two men standing in the dock were not unwashed, unshaven,
unemployed and uneducated, but two students currently studying Law at
university. Although that may not now be the case if they both have criminal
records. The point being, racism, homophobia, sexism and misogyny have always
been prevalent within all sections of society and still are. Twitter gives
people the opportunity to broadcast their ‘isms’ nationally and internationally
whereas previously they had to confine their prejudices to the pub, the
workplace or the home. Twitter is not responsible for the message, it is only
the conduit used to carry it. Don’t blame the messenger; blame the people who
mistake freedom of speech as having the right to say whatever they want without
any responsibility attached.
The question is, ‘why are people so angry and so full of
hate?’ I do not have the statistical breakdown by race, gender, colour, sexual
orientation or religion of all online abusers. Those statistics do not exist
but I will take a punt and say that I would not be surprised if it was proven
that the largest section of abusers were white, straight and male, not to say
that women, homosexuals and ethnic minorities cannot hold their own when it
comes to hate filled and irrational points of views.
So why so much hate
towards strangers? All hate is predominately fuelled by fear, whether it be a
fear ‘they’ are taking ‘our’ jobs, ‘our’ homes, ‘our land’ or, taking it to an
extreme, the fear of being harmed or killed, the fight or flight instinct. It
is innate within us all. When I was a kid growing up on a large council estate,
every autumn ‘travellers’ would form an encampment on the outskirts of the
estate and every year we would go and fight them. I never really knew why, I
just felt obligated as a local kid to go and fight the incomers who were,
apparently, different to us.
Add into the mix a
frustration and anger at an unfulfilled sense of entitlement and we might be
getting closer to understanding, if that is the right word, why there is so
much hate, anger and intolerance directed at immigrants ( taking ‘our’ jobs,
homes?) women ( taking men’s jobs?), welfare claimants ( taking ‘our’ money?),
or Islam ( taking ‘our’ land?).
This is just a hypothesis, I do not know the answer and
neither do you, but I think people feel disenfranchised, powerless, and angry,
and have a sense of resentment and injustice, gleefully fostered by politicians
and the media, that they feel the need to exorcise by hitting out at people
they perceive, incorrectly in most cases, as the perpetrators who are the cause
of that resentment, rather than addressing the ‘real’ reasons for their own
evident discontent, which is a government that governs for the few and not the
many and the fact, that some find hard to come to terms with, that we live in a
progressive society where gender equality, race equality and acceptance of
someone’s sexual orientation should be a given.
If that hate, anger
and frustration could be positively channelled into confronting and challenging
the real evils in this world, such as immoral self serving politicians, tax
avoiding multi nationals and corporations, the tax dodging wealthy, illegal
loggers, dolphin slaughterer’s and the suppurating and evil smelling sore that
is the right wing press, we could build a fairer and much more meritocratic
society and perhaps we would all be far more happier with our lot.
Until then, the
abusers are just going to have to suck it up and try to move on. It’s the year
2014, not 1914, which of course was a perfect exemplar of what happens when we
allow hate, greed, intolerance and the political expediency of the few to
profit over common sense and the interests of the many.
Thank you for taking time out to read my frequently inane
and often absurd ramblings.
No comments:
Post a Comment