In the wake of the attack, we can’t help but wonder how right-wing extremism and social media came together to promote both New Zealand’s worst shooting in its history, and an increase in cultural tensions across the world.
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A Modern Pharmakon
We live in a precarious time filled with double-edged swords. Technology, medicine, art, political institutions, cultural movements, social ideologies—all can be wonderful devices for human flourishing as much as dangerous means for its demise. Our greatest feats, thoughts, and hopes can all be used against us.
The Ancient Greeks had a fascinating term for this sort of thing: pharmakon. That which is a cure can, in the wrong measure, be a poison too. Too much of a good thing can be bad. Consider social media, for example.
Social media can be a great tool for connecting people, for building bridges, for instantly expressing our fears and doubts, for exposing injustice even in those places where the sun barely shines.
But it can be dangerous too. It provides means of coordination for vicious groups to band together. It can radicalize people who’d otherwise be detached from hatred and contempt. It can promote violence in its purest form. And it provides a platform for violent messages.
Those seeking attention now do so through social media, and they end up addicted to it. The reach and influence you can get through streaming an attack provides more than enough motivation for some people to do so. And the damage is done.
How disaster comes
This is not an issue exclusive to social media, though. Attacks such as this one have been carried out before, and in many ways they all present similar patterns. The internet itself was facilitating radicalization long before social media became ubiquitous, and traditional media was promoting attention-seeking behaviors long before the internet.
But social media exacerbates these problems. Through something as seemingly innocuous as Facebook groups or Twitter and Instagram hashtags, people of similar mentalities can find each other. That’s generally a good thing—it promotes a sense of community and belonging. But more and more the wrong kind of person is finding the wrong kind of group.
Social media all too easily allows the creation of echo chambers, where people, instead of being informed and presented with the weight of evidence for and against a particular idea, easily find a way to merely reaffirm what they already had a bias for. This involves what is known as confirmation bias: the tendency to only find, acknowledge, and recall information which confirm our preexisting beliefs.
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Be brave enough to challenge your beliefs
A group easily gets radicalized through that kind of mechanism. If you hold racist or xenophobic beliefs, and you choose to follow other racist people and xenophobic news networks, then you’ll end up becoming more convinced about your racism, rather than having it challenged. You can avoid any discomfort simply by “unfollowing” a page if it’s not in line with your thoughts. There will be no way for you to change your mind, even if you’re wrong.
The conviction ends up being so deep, and so supported by the people you get in contact with, that you’ll be driven beyond what’s reasonable. In the most extreme cases, radicals end up committing violence, since “God” or “justice” or “righteousness,” or what have you, is “on their side.” At least that’s the way they see it.
Combining echo chambers with confirmation bias is problematic enough. But when the person is prone to violence, you get a recipe for disaster. Those are the dangers of extremism in the age of social media. That’s the pharmakon, the double-edge sword, we have to deal with.
If we’re honest about our beliefs, we should be brave enough to challenge them—especially when they involve harming others. Social media isn’t going away, but perhaps we can stop ourselves from becoming violent through it.
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