Last week there was a statue unveiled in Newark, New Jersey in honour of George Floyd.
George Floyd was a criminal who was wrongfully killed whilst being arrested by a police officer.
Let me make it quite clear, he did not deserve to be killed as it happened and the officer involved has rightfully been prosecuted and sentenced for his killing.
This does not justify anyone anywhere from glorifying or sanctifying him just because he was wrongfully killed, after all is said and done; he was being arrested for a suspected crime at the time that he was killed.
George Floyd had a long history of lawbreaking and when his record is studied in its entirety then it quickly becomes clear that he was a person who never warranted having a statue erected that effectively honor’s him even if he was wrongfully killed by a police officer.
My problem is that as has happened in many other cases as well, and New Zealand is no exception, after an incident the keyboard warriors come out in force on social media and totally change the facts of the matter by simple weight of opinion often without any basis in fact.
This is now happening with much regularity due to the instant availability of social media and the fact that most people carry a device that allows them to connect directly with the world in an instant.
Then the world judges the scenario on the basis of the instant snapshot presented through the mass media without the benefit of the full facts around all of the participants or circumstances that led up to the scenario occurring.
If such judgement is repeated often enough it then becomes fact in the eyes of a large part of the population simply because it has been broadcast on social media and the majority of respondents have agreed with the initial judgement, whether it was correct or not.
This is the Power of Social Media that I am referring to in the headline.
The Idiocy is the fact that so many people today seem to agree with something just because it is broadcast on social media and repeated many times, without checking the facts for themselves. This I believe is just another form of laziness.
The Power of Social Media can be a force to achieve great things for humanity but when it is coupled with people’s innate laziness then it can become something that is very dangerous to the whole social fabric of our society.
A very large percentage of the news media have also become complicit in allowing this type of situation to occur by the very nature of their reporting of the news.
It is quite rare now days to find an investigative reporter who is prepared to go out and put in the effort to identify the true facts of the matter in any given scenario, and then question the participants and report the full story.
Many of the current so-called investigative reporters seem to do most of their investigating on social media sites, forming an opinion based on such investigations and then reporting those facts that support their opinion.
Whilst they do not tell any untruths, the selective reporting of facts can often change the whole direction of a story and again influence the public perception through comment on such reporting, through social media platforms.
A large part of this failing on behalf of the news media can be directed again at us the general public in the first instance as we are always asking for instant answers as we have been conditioned by social media to expect instant availability, and in the second part at the news media outlets for not demanding the full facts before reporting or at least identifying that the full facts are yet to be determined.
No, in many cases they just print the facts as reported by their staff, as long as they don’t contain any wrongful statements, as this supports their financial bottom lines. Again this is happening because we the general public expect and mostly demand instant reporting.
When we look back at history it becomes very clear that the first order of business for any Dictator or Terrorist organisation was always to control the media and reporting of fact. With the advent of mass social media platforms available to everyone on demand, this level of control is now almost an impossibility.
But the ability to control the public perception is still possible by controlling the spread of facts through the social media platforms and many people from all walks of life have now become very adept at manipulating social media platforms by use of the individual platforms algorithms for reporting. This is again an example of the Power of Social Media, good, bad or otherwise!
Andy Loader