Trolls rear ugly head after Knysna fires
It’s a time when we’re meant to be spreading goodwill, but why do the trolls come out even in a disaster, asks Terence Pillay.
Listen to today's feature below, or read the full story underneath the podcast.
I can’t believe that out of this tragedy, which is the Knysna fire, somehow South Africa in its sad, sick, twisted state of mind has managed to turn this into a race war. After the fire broke out, some people took to social media saying things like “We need more Knysna fires for all these white people to die” (sic) or “I actually smiled when I saw that Knysna is going thru it all, ‘cause we all know what the majority of the population is there white” (sic) and so on.
The fact that people immediately take things to social media is by no means unique to South Africa, and I think it’s good in a way that it exposes the raw, ugly, bleeding wound that is our dark underbelly. People feel it’s okay to say things like that on those particular platforms and believe they can say it with impunity. But we know now, more than ever, that this is not the case, because we’ve got the examples of Penny Sparrow and so on where these statements have real-world impact.
We seem to be at a time in our country where this racial divide is more prominent than ever and that’s because it’s become so pervasive. It invades every conversation and it appears to invade every snippet of news. And while I think that we do need to acknowledge it, we also need to remember the humanitarian side of things. Whatever people’s generalised feelings are, there are still human beings who have been affected here, and lives have been lost. And we should not presume that everybody living in Knysna is an affluent white person and that somehow it’s like a mini Oranje, and that everybody that was affected by the fire was white.
And by the same token, there was a paramedic who made some outlandish statement on Facebook about how it was God’s retribution because twelve same-sex couples were allowed to be married in Knysna. He subsequently deleted his account, but somebody screen-grabbed it before he did. So this is yet another example of the ridiculousness and the ridiculous generalisation that has become acceptable on social media.
And we need to ask ourselves: what are the institutions like the Human Rights Commission doing about it?
Is it a conspiracy? Are we being manipulated by some kind of other force that is tainting the conversation or is that genuinely how people feel? I can’t help but feel that maybe we’re being manipulated. We know of the examples, for instance Bell Pottinger and the campaign to highlight the divisions and the throw around of the term “White Capitalist Monopoly”, but for me this is not representative of everyday, ordinary South Africans going about their day-to-day lives.
This conversation needs to be taken away from our keyboards and computer screens and into the real world. If you can look someone in the eye and feel comfortable saying something really evil and mean when you’re face-to-face with them, having got to know them and knowing they have children and families (these could be your co-workers and friends), will you say the things you do on social media, hiding behind that screen?
People could probably do that but there is the risk that they’ll be lynched and attacked. But beyond just spewing this to some stranger’s face, to somebody you know or made an effort to get to know; to know that they’re human beings with issues and challenges and lives might look like a different ball game. But it’s not.
We all need to take responsibility. The danger is: if you dehumanise entire groups of people, it becomes much easier to continue to spew that kind of vitriol. Intellectuals, philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists have warned us about this kind of thing. They talk about how the devastation in Rwanda happened, for example – that systematically, over time, a particular group of people were defined as sub-human by the use of language.
The use of the word “cockroach”, for example, was used to define a group of people and slowly, sub-consciously over time it became easier and easier to treat those people as sub-human. And we need to make a conscious effort to undo that. The same thing happened with the Jews and Nazis in the holocaust – a group of people were systematically defined as less-than human and it made it easier for the Nazis to say “let’s expunge these people from our lives”. And this not okay or acceptable.
At the end of the day, perhaps you should not see every single attack that you come across on social media as a personal attack on you. It just needs to take a bit of strength of character for you to say, “that’s not about me because that is not who I am”. And that one person’s rant should not be the dipstick by which you measure what the majority of people are thinking.
And part of the solution is ensuring that your children aren’t enabled by whatever conversations you are having in your home to feel that it’s okay to take to social media and be racist. We need to be better than that, as parents, as human beings. If you continuously spew this kind of drivel at home, it becomes acceptable and it becomes your belief system.
And the fact of the matter is that kids are growing up as a multi-racial, multi-cultural group of people in schools and the message that you as a parent are sending out at home conflicts with what the child is learning in the real world, and you are going to create some kind of cognitive dissonance – where what you experience is in direct conflict with what you believe.
And that creates trauma and stress.
How do you react to hate on social media? What do you do?
The fact that people immediately take things to social media is by no means unique to South Africa, and I think it’s good in a way that it exposes the raw, ugly, bleeding wound that is our dark underbelly. People feel it’s okay to say things like that on those particular platforms and believe they can say it with impunity. But we know now, more than ever, that this is not the case, because we’ve got the examples of Penny Sparrow and so on where these statements have real-world impact.
We seem to be at a time in our country where this racial divide is more prominent than ever and that’s because it’s become so pervasive. It invades every conversation and it appears to invade every snippet of news. And while I think that we do need to acknowledge it, we also need to remember the humanitarian side of things. Whatever people’s generalised feelings are, there are still human beings who have been affected here, and lives have been lost. And we should not presume that everybody living in Knysna is an affluent white person and that somehow it’s like a mini Oranje, and that everybody that was affected by the fire was white.
And by the same token, there was a paramedic who made some outlandish statement on Facebook about how it was God’s retribution because twelve same-sex couples were allowed to be married in Knysna. He subsequently deleted his account, but somebody screen-grabbed it before he did. So this is yet another example of the ridiculousness and the ridiculous generalisation that has become acceptable on social media.
And we need to ask ourselves: what are the institutions like the Human Rights Commission doing about it?
Is it a conspiracy? Are we being manipulated by some kind of other force that is tainting the conversation or is that genuinely how people feel? I can’t help but feel that maybe we’re being manipulated. We know of the examples, for instance Bell Pottinger and the campaign to highlight the divisions and the throw around of the term “White Capitalist Monopoly”, but for me this is not representative of everyday, ordinary South Africans going about their day-to-day lives.
This conversation needs to be taken away from our keyboards and computer screens and into the real world. If you can look someone in the eye and feel comfortable saying something really evil and mean when you’re face-to-face with them, having got to know them and knowing they have children and families (these could be your co-workers and friends), will you say the things you do on social media, hiding behind that screen?
People could probably do that but there is the risk that they’ll be lynched and attacked. But beyond just spewing this to some stranger’s face, to somebody you know or made an effort to get to know; to know that they’re human beings with issues and challenges and lives might look like a different ball game. But it’s not.
We all need to take responsibility. The danger is: if you dehumanise entire groups of people, it becomes much easier to continue to spew that kind of vitriol. Intellectuals, philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists have warned us about this kind of thing. They talk about how the devastation in Rwanda happened, for example – that systematically, over time, a particular group of people were defined as sub-human by the use of language.
The use of the word “cockroach”, for example, was used to define a group of people and slowly, sub-consciously over time it became easier and easier to treat those people as sub-human. And we need to make a conscious effort to undo that. The same thing happened with the Jews and Nazis in the holocaust – a group of people were systematically defined as less-than human and it made it easier for the Nazis to say “let’s expunge these people from our lives”. And this not okay or acceptable.
At the end of the day, perhaps you should not see every single attack that you come across on social media as a personal attack on you. It just needs to take a bit of strength of character for you to say, “that’s not about me because that is not who I am”. And that one person’s rant should not be the dipstick by which you measure what the majority of people are thinking.
And part of the solution is ensuring that your children aren’t enabled by whatever conversations you are having in your home to feel that it’s okay to take to social media and be racist. We need to be better than that, as parents, as human beings. If you continuously spew this kind of drivel at home, it becomes acceptable and it becomes your belief system.
And the fact of the matter is that kids are growing up as a multi-racial, multi-cultural group of people in schools and the message that you as a parent are sending out at home conflicts with what the child is learning in the real world, and you are going to create some kind of cognitive dissonance – where what you experience is in direct conflict with what you believe.
And that creates trauma and stress.
How do you react to hate on social media? What do you do?
You can email Terence Pillay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @terencepillay1 and tweet him your thoughts.