This is good and insightful for sure, but there is vital context: The left’s picture of who Charlie Kirk was is who he really was. Any asshole can get up sometimes in a speech and say some words about empowerment. But he wasn’t running seminars in how to reach your potential and be a better person. His whole professional life was centered around punishing enemies, being more evil because that’s what’s needed right now, how you don’t need to have empathy for other people because that whole concept is fake.
I do agree about the awesome power of the echo chamber (I would say probably a single digit percent of people are even aware of those Democratic politicians who got murdered), but I don’t think it needs to be made out as a bipartisan thing. There is one specific side in American politics that makes lying and curating a fictional worldview into their whole global strategy, and they’re fucking good at it. That’s much more the problem than just a generalized “social media filter bubble” issue. There are not people on the other side, for whom the shootings of Democrats form their whole picture of how things are happening, and who never heard that Charlie Kirk got shot.
This is very well said.
The few bits of him that people heard about were plenty enough to know exactly what kind of a person he was. Just like the 2-second Nazi salutes are enough to know exactly who Elon Musk is.
May he rot in hell.
While I don’t have any time for him, and the world is a better place without him, the point of those screencaps is the claim that some portion of the (US) population had a totally sanitised view of him, that didn’t include all the reasons we detest him.
Their point is that “The few bits of him that people heard about were plenty enough to know exactly what kind of a person he was.” isn’t true (supposedly, I’m skeptical). Supposedly there is a group of people in a bubble that only saw Kirk preaching kindness and light and none of the awful stuff.
Sounds hard for me to believe but that’s the claim (which you aren’t addressing).
Many rightwing Christians live in a sanitized bubble on social media so they won’t see the racist content from Kirk because they avoid other “edgy” content so the algorithms do not supply this content.
But that is the exact point of this point, a LOT of people never have seen this 2-sec bits because the media they follow only show the other things.
And this encapsulates exactly why social media is divisive and destroying our society. It allows people to sit in their own echo chambers and only hear what they want to hear.
The only thing that breaks through the echo chambers is the advertising the tech companies target at people.
What we need is regulation of social media - the monopolies need to be broken open and news and information from a variety of high quality news sources needs to be forced into people’s feeds.
Things are less extreme in the UK and Europe partly because we still have public service news organisations that people trust and still listen but even that is not enough as that is being edited out of people’s lives.
The solution to the violence and disinformation is regulation of social media and forced access to good information. It doesn’t have to be one news source but a variety of news sources need to be forced into people’s feeds instead of the advertising. That is how we save society from social media and make the discourse and discussion better.
I’d also suggest the right are more susceptible to disinformation because religious groups like to control what people see. Religious people select themselves into more extreme echo chambers. So if you’re Christian you’re constantly told that you shouldn’t consume certain media because it’s bad, and instead they only consume “wholesome” sources that have also been weaponised by the right wing. So any regulation of social media needs to cut a cross that for the good of society - peoplee need to be shown the news, warts and all, regardless of age, religion or political beliefs.
They wouldn’t be alone in mourning a person for who they thought they were.
I know it’s a silly comparison, but similar thing happened to me with Hulk Hogan. When I was a little kid I thought he was so cool, and like a masculine role model.
But then I learned about him actually being a grade A piece of shit, and I felt a real loss.
This happened before he died, but I can imagine being confused if he died before I knew any of that and suddenly the internet was erupting with hate for an old role model.
Moral is don’t put people on pedestals and watch out for shitheads I guess!
Oddly, I would already assume that if he’s a Christian motivational speaker that he would already have held racist and fascist beliefs.
If someone sees a bunch of people celebrating, mocking, and/or expressing apathy about someone’s death and responds by assuming all those people are evil instead of spending 15 seconds to search or ask why, that’s on them. If someone is totally oblivious of the other politically motivated murders that have happened recently, that’s on them.
Relying on social media entirely for one’s news is a choice. That level of ignorance is a choice. This behavior isn’t “critical to understand;” it’s a lazy choice that deserves to be called out and mocked.
A person who, when shown evidence counter to their understanding, accepting that information and updating their worldview isn’t honestly much of a problem. They’re just ignorant and the left is pretty decent at awareness campaigns. They’d have gotten educated eventually.
It’s all the people who were shown that exact same information and then doubled down. And there’s a horrifying number of those people out there. Enough to seemingly keep the country firmly on track for a fascist takeover. I don’t know how to reach those people.
