Recently I was watching John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight episode on Facebook, and for the first time in my life found myself terribly at odds with his opinion. The segment was largely dedicated toward condemning Facebook for their actions in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), specifically for their poor job in censoring out hate speech.
The show’s thesis was that Facebook empowered the predominantly-Buddhist culture’s hostility towards the Muslim minority through negligence. Facebook, in Oliver’s opinion, should have had significantly more translators and Burmese-speaking individuals removing flagged content from Facebook so that the Buddhist’s majority wouldn’t have been able to so easily rally against the Muslims.
My first thought: if this hatred was worsened by Facebook, didn’t that mean it already existed?
My second thought: Hasn’t such racial tension always existed for our species? And for that matter, hasn’t xenophobia and shitty behavior of all kinds been around well before the internet?
Do we blame the crusades on the existence of language?
Do we blame the Holocaust on the printing press and the radio?
Of course not.
This fallacy in thought represented by Oliver and many others terrifies me because it attacks the medium for displaying the message. It’s unproductive, it incorrectly shifts blame, and ultimately it plays into a sensationalist fear of technology rather than providing optimism and hope to the masses. In other words, it’s good for television ratings, but it’s bad for the psychological well-being of humanity.
Common sense dictates that whatever the most advanced communication medium is that exists, it will inevitably be used to share bad ideas and hatred. But that’s not the fault of the communication medium, it’s the fault of the humans who have bad ideas.
You can’t fight what you don’t know about
If anything, we should be thankful for these platforms on the internet, because what these communication mediums do is reveal to us the truth that has been long hidden.
The Buddhists in Myanmar, for instance, have been persecuting Muslims quite heavily ever since the 1962 coup d’état. This was something I know myself and many others have largely been unaware of. But now, thanks to Facebook and the internet, this behavior has been brought to global attention, and as a species — perhaps represented by an entity like the UN — can step in and assist the Muslims and attempt diplomacy with the Buddhists. Besides, wouldn’t we prefer if individuals qualified in dealing with human rights were handling the situation, rather than Facebook’s team of engineer and lawyers?
If we can address the bad ideas at their core and help the people eradicate such hateful practices from their minds, then they won’t use Facebook to spread hatred. The tool becomes used for good rather than for bad.
And yes, I understand that manipulative algorithms have made tools like Facebook less “neutral.” But such manipulation cultivates an addiction to their sites, not xenophobia. It’s called the “attention economy,” not the “hate economy.”
The Spotlight On Our Darkness Is True Progress
I believe this tendency of the internet to bring the dark truths to the surface are the very reason we are currently facing such difficult times. We’re finally seeing what’s always taken place behind the scenes; the monsters are being revealed. And now, with awareness of these negative aspects of our culture and the monsters these ideas have spawned, we feel forced into a war to right these wrongs. Our fear and anger has been triggered to deal with the demons of our species the internet has revealed.
For example:
How long have men raped women in the shadows? How long have businesses and politicians created back-alley deals that exploited the average citizen and turned nations into oligarchies? How long has the black community been unjustly profiled, arrested, and assaulted in America?
I’ll tell you how long: a very, very, very long time.
But thanks to the internet, we now live in a time where people of color, women, and those in a lower socio-economic bracket are finally able to share their perspectives to the world — to communicate and cooperate, to reveal the truth that’s long been hidden in the shadows.
Similarly, racists and sexists and elitists individuals (such as the Burmese Buddhists) use these mediums to communicate their messages of hate; and guess what? Now we have proof of their character. We can look at their tweets, hack their emails, screenshot their messages, etc, and we can bring these horrible monsters to light for justice.
Sure, justice feels like it’s been slow to catch up, largely because the judges are the very oppressors we’re up against — but, progress is being made. We’ve had thousands of years for bad ideas to be cultivated inside our governments, religions, and cultures, and our tool for awareness (the internet) is younger than most people who qualify for an influential position in our society. But even then, amazing things have already started to happen. But in only a few short years, we’ve seen gay marriage, pot legalization, the women’s march, the march for science, the Paris treaty, #metoo, #blacklivesmatter, a black president, a women nominee nearly becoming President, trans individuals winning government positions, and so many more stories of progressive success.
The tide is turning, and the tumultuousness being displayed online is a result of the human lashback — not of a technology failure.
Even mighty icons like Bill Cosby are no longer able to do their evil behind closed doors because the internet has inspired so many to voice their truths, knowing that many others are likely to step forward, to cheer them on for their courage.
I know, I can barely believe I’m saying this myself, but perhaps we should feel fortunate to have mediums like Facebook. Any platform that allows us to lift up the bold and courageous who wish to reveal the evil that has so long been lurking in the shadows feels like a boon to society. Without such a medium, the terrors of mankind would have simply kept happening as they have throughout the ages, and we would have all brushed it under the rug as “just the way things are,” saying “well, I’ve never seen it, so I can’t pass any judgment.”
Well, guess what — we can’t be that naive anymore. And technology is to thank for that.
In the past, what we couldn’t see, we couldn’t fight. But now that we can see it, we can fight it.
The Internet Represents the Mental Health of Humanity
The internet and Facebook and Twitter have become the void we all shout into after a long day of frustration, it’s the god we pray to when we need support and answers, it’s the webcam we perform for when we want validation, and the podium we speak from when we feel we have something to say to the world.
It is the collective unconscious of our species, and by exploring what we’ve all uploaded, we’ve been able to reveal the viruses that for so long have ruined our minds. We have a mental illness thanks to a culture that’s allowed for racism, misogyny, greed, selfishness, and all forms of hate for far too long.
But at least now we know! Unequivocally, we know!
And the last thing we want to do now that we know is censor our species’ primary form of communications to hide the illness once more — because then we lose sight of it and become once more unable to stop it. We are the planet’s most adaptable species, and over time our cultural immune system will adjust to cope with the realities of the world. Like a vaccine that exposes you to a little bit of the virus so that your body can learn how to fight it, we too will become stronger thanks to the exposure.
Women become stronger. People of color become stronger. Love and compassion and empathy become stronger. We all become stronger.
So to fix technology’s impact on people — to fix the hostility, the trolling, the exacerbation of hate crimes, etc — we have to fix the people. And that means we have to stop passing the blame from ourselves and onto inert technology.
We need to realize that — thanks to technology — this is the age where we can no longer hide from our own bullshit. We have to either grow up and finally become a mature species that can use their tools responsibly…
Or else we’ll all simply kill each other in the throes of hypocritical violence, our hands around each other’s throat as we yell: “Technology made me do it!”
