Social Media: A double-edged Sword

Gift Mambipiri

Before 1991 professional journalists – men and women who were trained in the art of communication - were the ‘sole traders’ in news and information. And the world each morning drank from their calabash.

The information revolution set in with the onset of the telegraph, and then the telephone, followed by Radio and Television, which allowed for more ears and eyes to get information at speeds never seen before.

The arrival and opening up to the public of the Internet in 1991 was a real game changer. Since then new and exciting social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Skype and WhatsApp have became everyday tools for personalized and efficient communication.

Today, social media usage is one of the most popular online activities the world over. In 2020, an estimated 3.6 billion people reportedly use social media, globally, out of a world population of 7.8 billion people. This year, the global number of Facebook users is expected to reach 1.69 billion, a sharp rise from a mere 1.34 million users in 2014. If Facebook was a country, it would be having more people today than the current world most populous country, China (1.3b) or Africa as a continent, which is home to 1.2 billion people.

Zimbabwe has not been left behind in embracing social media as a tool for everyday communication. More than half the Zimbabwean adult population has access to the Internet, through which they access social media pages. On average, human beings spend two and half-hours daily on social media, proving that social media is an inseparable part of our everyday lives. It is always there, from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep with our phone in hand.

The social media connection has been both liberating and disruptive. It is liberating in the sense that almost anyone with a voice has found a channel through which they could express themselves, and reach thousands of people. This was not possible with the bottlenecks of the old traditional media. The powerful men of our days are daily in contact with the commoners of this world. And with everyone trying to observe ‘social distancing’ during these COVID 19 moments, it is social media that has kept families, neighbours, and workmates in touch. Schools, businesses and churches have remained open and in relative progress and production mode, thanks to social media platforms.

The youths in particular have seen social media as a blessing. Many of the challenges facing this current generation of contemporary youth are certainly transnational in character. Growing up in the neoliberal global economy, their futures have become bound-up with the baggage of previous generations: a legacy of climate change, the politics of fear, precarious employment opportunities, and austerity cuts in state support, to name the most obvious. Yet many national and local media fail to adequately address the problems confronting these young citizens. Faced with an impoverished public sphere that all too often restricts the pluralistic expression of diverse interests, and instead favours the voices of the most powerful groups in their societies, many young citizens have sought alternative digital channels to find expression for their discontent. In this way, social media has become the communicative tool of choice for many young citizens to express their indignation and sense of

outrage at their bequeathed plight (Castells 2012). Social media freed communication, but it has also been co-opted to aid the vile parts of it as well. The speed and scale of social media reach have allowed these vile parts to escape many of the firebreaks that society, through professional communicators, had built up to protect itself. There is a quote from a retired US Army officer (Havana 2018;37), who described how every village once had an idiot. And now, social media has brought them all together and made them more powerful than ever before. Social media rewards not morality or veracity in communication, but virality. It’s the number of ‘likes’ and the ‘retweets’ that motivates the writers, and not the truth or sensitivity of the subject matter. Their design is a perfect engine for the fast and wide spread of information, which makes them so wonderful. But there is a catch: unlike the truth, lies and hatred can be engineered to take advantage of that design and move faster and wider. Because of its disregard for morality and veracity, social media is responsible for the many present-day conflicts. It’s created new, highly accessible channels for spreading disinformation, sowing divisiveness and contributing to real-world harm in the form of violence, persecution and exploitation. Disinformation campaigns are being used to systematically manipulate political discourse within a state, influencing news reporting, silencing dissent, undermining the integrity of democratic governance and electoral systems, and strengthening the hand of authoritarian regimes. These campaigns play out in three phases: 1) the development of core narratives, 2) onboarding of influencers and fake account operators, and 3) dissemination and amplification on social media (Chu-

ma, W 2017:17) Anyone familiar with the Zimbabwean narrative of the past 20 years can confirm this. The media, and recently now also social media, has been used to do positional reporting, disregarding facts when it came to the topical issues of the past two decades starting with the land reform, economic sanctions on the country, political violence and human rights abuse reportage, as well as the contentious issues around national elections. No political party is innocent of these vices.

What is evident is the army of social media users, agree or endorse any utterance or discussion position, not because the facts say its good, but merely on the basis of who said it. And they use uncanny language, choosing the most hurtful words in their vocabulary, to express their disapproval.

There have been some red flags already. A local media watchdog, Media Monitors, noted in its Hate Speech Reports (May-August 2020) that social media were responsible for fanning divisions in the country through posts that were factually false, and created to hurt, incite violence and embarrass other people. What the Media Monitors are seeing and reporting today, was noted and captured 8 years ago in a Silveira House report (2012: 11) which stated that hard media polarisation coming through the internet, “fanned hate speech, violence, and other disharmonies in the country.” The problem is not limited to Zimbabwe, or Africa alone. After the 2016 US presidential election, social media came under scrutiny like never before, and what has since come to light has not been pretty: widespread consensus that foreign government-backed groups used platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook to spread discord and division among the American public. In their new book, P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking (2019) make the argument that what we witnessed was a new form of global conflict, in which there are no bystanders.

The weaponisation of social media also took centre stage in 2010, when its utility was highlighted in the major demonstrations often referred to as the Arab Spring. This led to the now-familiar hyperbolic descriptions of “twitter revolutions.” Building a Global Community that Leaves Nobody Behind Notwithstanding the negatives, it is too late to ignore, or seek to do without social media. The fact is the youth are the future and they constitute 67% of the world’s population. These youths consume news and information through sound and digital images. It is no coincidence, therefore, that even politicians now frequently tweet their policy choices and make YouTube videos (embarrassing or otherwise) to reach those social media spaces inhabited by young citizens

What we need to adopt, therefore, is the attitude of Pope Francis: “The revolution taking place in communications media and in information technologies represents a great and thrilling challenge; may we respond to that challenge with fresh energy and imagination as we seek to share with others the beauty of God.” (48th World Communications Day message)

Or perhaps we need to enter into the world of those driving social medial platforms, like Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, who published a social media manifesto “Building Global Community” (2017) with the intention of advising communities on how best to use social media. The idea being to use social media “in ways that encourage respect, dialogue, honest relationships – in other words true friendships.”