What role does social media play in the rising tide of social unrest and the seemingly ever-growing levels of hatred and division?
I used to think that it took a lot to scare me; I’m not talking about the anxiety that often afflicts me, but real fear – the kind I’m experiencing right now. It’s the same kind of shiver I felt on election night and the same as I felt last week when I watched my country burn.
The rise of the Far Right and the subsequent riots have prompted a degree of soul-searching that has thrown me off balance.
As I search for answers, I find myself unsettled by a deeper, more personal question—one that exposes the source of my inner turmoil and one I don’t think I will ever be able to answer.
What is it about my own faith that, while I’m quite happy to believe in God, I’m so reluctant to believe in the devil despite so much evidence to the contrary?
For it feeds on poverty and social deprivation. And rather like boiling a frog, it’s too late by the time we know it’s too hot.
Let’s face it, and I’m not suggesting for a second that the devil does exist, but if he did, I can think of no better way to do his bidding than through social media.
Social media: the world of the devil?
An algorithm that drives division and profits from hatred sounds to me like the work of a devilish mind, so who do we blame – those who wrote the code and profited from it – or those who merely danced to its rhythm?
I get it, people are angry, rightly so, for those who had the least, had the most to lose – and they lost it. Social media just stepped into that economic void and gave that justified anger a platform. But in amplifying that bitterness, it lost its voice and got aimed at a manufactured enemy.
Now, I have no questions about the root cause of the riots – you can sum it up in one word: austerity.
Nothing to do with immigration. Austerity is at the core of all this misery. That warped doctrine, that insane ideology – the mantra of madness that just keeps on giving.
Social media exploits that fury, harnesses our inner demons, and builds the head of steam that powers its engine of greed. No wonder it has a vested interest in stoking those fires.
Social media algorithms encourage and embolden us- we are each placed at the centre of our own universe, free to rotate in whatever direction we choose, regardless of the will of others or the consequences.
In this process, we crash, clank, and collide with countless other personal planets, where each individual at the centre of their universe believes the world revolves around them. This friction inevitably generates heat and creates its own form of global warming.
Any rich idiot (oh, why do we equate wealth with intelligence) whose income is generated by the rotation of these worlds is bound to lubricate them. The faster they rotate, the more they make. They don’t care what makes them turn, only that the turn. Faster, quicker, whirl those worlds. So what if they spin out of control – it’s good for business.
So, if (God forbid) he does exist, that would make Elon Musk nothing more than a useful idiot at Beelzebub’s command.
The devil in all of us
Social media has shown that there is a little piece of the devil in us all, so perhaps the inherent wickedness is that it allows us to join the dots and then allows a much greater evil to flourish—the whole being much, much greater than the sum of the parts.
No matter what you might think about the devil, you can’t deny the existence of evil. So, maybe it’s good in me, but I don’t believe these are bad people, or even good people who have done bad things, but something in between – imperfect humans like me or you with our inner evil unleashed and amplified by a mob mentality.
Just as we’ve yet to fully understand the long-term effects of microwaves and mobile phones, let alone AI, we are only beginning to grasp social media’s profound impact on our society.
Freedom of speech is sacrosanct. But what if being able to say what we want with convenience and conviction at a volume out of all proportion to consequences is tearing the very fabric of society, what if amplifying the pub bore to the level of Socrates endangers us all?
I think the time has come to think long and hard about our relationship with social media. There is a great line in the cult film Constantine that goes something like this “I don’t believe in the devil… You should. He believes in you.”