Speaking on the first day of SXSW here in Austin, about the Feb 28 attack in Iran that killed 170 people (mostly schoolgirls), journalist Tara Palmeri responded to an audience question about how current events are affecting school-age children in this country.
She said “We know, for example, that our Tomahawk missile (only 4 countries have the Tomahawk, but of those only the U.S. is in Iran), bombed a school in Iran. Our president will not acknowledge that.
“That is like next-level gaslighting of the American people that has to trickle down to that generation. I don’t see how that isn’t just completely destabilizing for young people to feel like they’re grasping at some sort of truth, something that says, “Yes, the sky is blue, the grass is green.”
Her co-speaker, Imran Ahmed, was on stage in a session entitled Who Owns the Truth? He is the founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Ahmed (a British citizen) is in the United States on a green card, and he told the SXSW audience that the Administration is trying to deport him because of his outspoken views. Continuing to respond to the audience question, Ahmed said this.
“I just think in the same way that we’re going to have to have real-time conversations with them about the physical environment that we’ve left our kids, I think we have to beg their forgiveness for the information environment that we’ve left them and tell them that we understand that what they are seeing people say about where they are, about reality, is untrue.
“And that is because of failure. Something has gone wrong and it can’t be their jobs, without our help, to fix it. And it’s terrible to say that. I’m desperate to make sure that my 18-month-old and my 11-day-old do not have to live with that, but I think they do.”
They both identified social media, and the algorithms that push its content, as a major problem. Of the social media leaders, Ahmed said “Essentially we’re talking about five incredible wealthy men who have absolutely no connection to the lives that most people live, who are so wealthy that they’re immunising themselves from even having to recognise reality as it exists.”
Ahmed spoke of his life-changing experience in London a decade ago.
“Two weeks before the election [on June 16, 2016], a man called Thomas Mair took a modified .22 hunting rifle and a knife. and attacked, shot and stabbed my colleague, Joe Cox, who was a Member of Parliament. While he was killing her, he was screaming ‘Britain First, death to traitors.
“Britain First was the name of that political movement, and death to traitors was the hashtag being used for the version of the Great Replacement Theory that was so prevalent on social media.
And in my grief, on that day, I realised a profound – to me – truth, which is that every conventional institution I care about – Parliament, the government, the BBC, journalists and everything – we missed something profound that was happening. Which was that of the primary place where we share information, where we establish our social morals, our norms of attitude and behaviour, of where we negotiate our values, even where we negotiate the forms of information that we call facts and shift into online spaces. Those social media platforms had learned to weaponize them more effectively than anyone else, and that the mathematics of those platforms – what won and what lost, what information we saw – was completely different from the real world. New opportunities are emerging, but we’re at this very, very febrile point where we don’t know what’s going to win.”
Palmeri chimed in, saying “I am a person who really likes challenge, so I see it as a challenge. Which can be exhausting, but I also see what is behind us: gatekeepers at various newspaper news agencies, that’s gone. And so I can either live in the past and cry about it, or I can look to the future and try to be a part of it in a way that provides people some grounding.
“I think we need anchors. not in the typical TV news sense, but we need anchors of reliable information out there in a world of conspiracy and Reddit, and people like Alex Jones. I think people in Gen Z feel unmoored. They feel like the algorithm is creating a world for them where they don’t know what to believe. They seem to want some grounding in the chaotic life of algorithms.”
Since, on average, a 14 to 17 year old in America spends 4.8 hours a day on social media, the game is afoot!
Ahmed was explicit about his feelings. Turning the Palmeri, a level-headed journalist, he said “I fear you are the last generation of truth-tellers that gives a fuck about the truth.
NORMALISATION
Ahmed said “In that first report I ever wrote, which is seven years old now, we actually found Neo-Nazi playbooks on how to weaponize social media, to maximise their reach.
And they said, basically, you need to say the wildest things possible. Because then, when all the media starts engaging with your content, they’re going to make you more visible. And all that matters is visibility. Because with visibility comes normalisation.
With normalisation, we are able to become the new normal: we move from the fringes to the main stream. And can anyone describe the last 10 years in any better way than that precise phenomenon?
The fringes moving to the mainstream. Should we not cover them now as journalists? This is one of the challenges for people that still care about the truth.
Photo by C Cunningham