280 characters in search of new politics
Sixteen-year-old Thunberg organised a school climate strike in her native Sweden that inspired thousands to do the same in Britain where an environmental campaign, Extinction Rebellion, recently organised high-profile civil disobedience to urge radical action to curb carbon emissions.
At just 29, McKee was a talented Northern Ireland journalist destined to be an influential voice of a generation that barely knew the Troubles, which claimed the lives of 3,600 people before the Belfast Agreement of 1998.
She was covering a riot in Derry when a gunman fired at police vans where she was standing. Her murder struck a raw nerve and the revulsion was enhanced by social media. She became a posthumous poster girl for those who despair that the main parties have refused to reinstate the province's long suspended devolved government. Her funeral was attended by the British and Irish Prime Ministers who heard a passionate appeal by the priest who had christened her to get the power-sharing government back on track.
Such impacts would once have taken years or smaller in scale but social media has short-circuited the process and made it much easier to build brands with massive support.
Social media also makes it easier to find considering that some writing rarely makes it into the papers. A new problem is information overload. Social media is a great way of sending and receiving information whilst wiser users consciously avoid being part of an echo chamber of like-minded people who merely reinforce their prejudices. Social media is good at unearthing truths that politicians have denied. Researchers have, for instance, been enabled to find and expose genuine anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim hatred.
Social media has given a platform to those who boost stories of heroism or endearing videos of cats and dogs as well as shameless charlatans and sloganeers who peddle conspiracy theories: collusion between Israel and Daesh, ancient hatreds of the Jews, or the alleged dangers of vital vaccinations that tempt some parents to spurn necessary jabs for their children, which endangers both their children and wider public health.
But character assassinations are easier too. A friend, Nora Mulready, was selected as a European candidate for the new Change UK, the Independent Group. She has been a consistent critic of Islamism, a proponent of women's rights, and set up Labour for Kurds some years back. In an attempt to get her deselected as a candidate, she was accused of supporting far-right leader, Tommy Robinson, by saying that the fact that half a million people had in 48 hours signed a petition in support of him showed that Robinson had "hit a societal nerve & that needs to be acknowledged if we want his movement to stop growing." The denunciations often omitted the crucial caveat which entirely changes the purpose of the tweet. Thankfully, her candidacy survived the unjustified onslaught of an online lynch mob.
Twitter can squash informed debate while some innocent victims lack the firepower to respond and are knocked out of contention. It is often said that a lie is half way round the world before the truth can get its boots on. That process has been truncated and people feel less willing to express opinions.
Not everyone uses social media but its controversies often set the wider agenda and can create a treadmill of hyperbole. This has done much to deepen divisions in what Times columnist, Janice Turner calls "the age of intransigence."
The fearless and forensic writer Nick Cohen analyses this in the Prospect magazine. He writes that "Look everywhere and you see an inquisitorial insistence on the sinfulness of anyone who disagrees with the far Right or Left. Competing interests or philosophies no longer explain a rival view of the world. Dissent is evidence of personal wickedness and corruption. It is the personal element that is the most striking feature of modern conspiratorial politics. The underlying assumption is that an opponent would agree with Brexit or Trump or Jeremy Corbyn if they were honest. Only their sinfulness can explain why they refuse to embrace the true faith; a sinfulness fed by corrupt monetary motives, or an irrational hatred of whites, Muslims or sovereign nation states." Such politics is not entirely new but has been given a high-octane twist in social media.
It also helps explain the intractability of Brexit, which former Conservative MP and current Times columnist, Matthew Parris, thinks could mean three UK Prime Ministers this year: Theresa May followed by Boris Johnson who could then lose an election to Jeremy Corbyn. Parris thinks that the UK will either revoke Brexit or go for a referendum.
The frenetic pace of debate set by social media has made it easier to overstate the case for and against Brexit in absolutist terms: liberation or disaster. If the UK leaves, I hope the UK is big enough to weather the economic consequences in time but there is a growing market, if or rather when the main parties further split, for renewing the political system that got us here in the first place.
More people also recognise the need to drain the cesspit of social media and tame the wild west of big data. We will have to live with online shouty-shoutiness and seek a resilient politics that accommodates conflicting interests based on much more than 280 characters of spleen and abuse.
Gary Kent is the Secretary of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG). He writes this column for Rudaw in a personal capacity. The address for the all-party group is appgkurdistan@gmail.com.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
