OPINION: The hate has always been here. But now it’s boiling over, and it’s become more socially acceptable to let white-nationalist, misogynistic, even murderous flags fly (by Jenn Jefferys/TVO)
OPINION: The hate has always been here. But now it’s boiling over, and it’s become more socially acceptable to let white-nationalist, misogynistic, even murderous flags fly (by Jenn Jefferys/TVO)
What’s happening is social media.
You have a bigot, what do you do about it?
Sure you can punch the bigot. Violence begets violence; might fix the problem or make it worse.
So what do you? Confront them. Then if they don’t change their ways, you shun them. Generally people don’t like being excluded, so slowly but surely the bigots would reform and some would die alone with their hatred.
Now? They have online platforms where they find each other through algorithms that encourages those behaviors because it makes them money.
You want to reduce the hatred on society? Police properly the big social medias.
This is absolutely true: social media has allowed these groups to network, and the same algorithm that knows to feed me pictures of cute dogs to keep me on the platform also knows it helps to feed Nazi-adjacent rage-bait to keep vulnerable people engaged.
A huge, huge thing we could do is force social media companies to change to a simple, chronological algorithm, instead of one that’s predicated on feeding users rage-bait.