Social media, like most technological advances before it, has become a highly effective tool for bigots, racists, and revisionists. It is up to those of us who wish to rise above prejudice to respond and correct “misinformation” (a gentle word for lies) when we see it.

I just came across an excellent post On Reem Abeidoh’s blog on this very subject. Reem asks:

“The real people in the online world bring their prejudice to the communities they belong to. However, if there is a strong enough brigade who shuns and demotes these people, would their muscles deflate? Can the community establish an internal code to ensure that everyone feels comfortable online?”

I am not sure how enforceable a code would be. I do agree strongly that those of us who are intelligent and skilled writers and researchers (bloggers), sometimes with sizable audiences, can do much to counter the lies with a reasoned, well-researched response.

I am Jewish, and recently found myself on a Facebook group where a conspiracy theorist was explaining how the Jews control the media, the government, the banks and big business. They also incidentally helped found Nazism! In this case, one of the “sources” used to prove this was The Protocols of Zion, a book that has long been recognized by scholars as a fraud, but which is still popular with anti-Semites.

Conspiracy theorists claim that the Protocols of Zion are a master plan by “the elders of Zion.” This is patently absurd. The source material was written about Napoleon III, and was not written about Zionism, nor influenced by it. How then could it be what propagandists claim it to be? It isn’t. The Times of London exposed the hoax of the protocols in 1921, but over the years it has been convenient to ignore this, and subsequent evidence, that the protocols are bogus, because the fraud is the foundation of so many claims of a vast, global Zionist conspiracy.

When I posted this information to the Facebook group, the person I was arguing with eventually conceded this point and went on to quote other sources. I feel I made a small victory, and either embarrassed the author for his being so easily dran into this 100-year-old scam, or perhaps influenced others who might have thought his claims valid.

Based on my Facebook experience, here are my suggestions for responding to online hatred:

• Respond factually and unemotionally
• Cite reliable, unbiased sources. There are no truly unbiased sources, but don’t for example, quote a Jewish source in a Jewish argument.)
• Be logical and methodical
• Choose your cause, become an expert on it and use social media tools like RSS, Google News Alerts and Technorati blog search to track interesting conversation
• DO NOT link to racist sites and material unless you have to. This only propagates this information and improves its search engine ranking. Obviously if you are responding to someone, you have to link to that person’s blog or web site, but don’t succumb to the temptation to provide a number of links to racist content to illustrate the problem. Don’t help these people.

I’ve just started thinking about this in the past six months or so, and I would love to hear your comments on the seriousness of this problem and what bloggers can do about it.

bigotry, facebook, hatred, online racism, prejudice, propaganda, protocols of zion, reim abeidoh No comments

If like me, you find it ironic that war is so often touted as a means to achieve peace, then you should buy (and watch) War Made Easy, a video that is far more important than Al Gore’s Academy Award winning Inconvenient Truth. This 73-minute video from the Media Education Foundation, describes “How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” and examines wartime rhetoric, how politicians deceive the American people with cleverly crafted messages, and how the media have abrogated the role of public watchdog to become agents of the administration.

You’ll be able to hear phrases like “cut and run” and “stay the course,” dozens of times from as many politicians and pundits. Based on research by, and hosted by, Norman Solomon, and narrated by Sean Penn, War Made Easy would be an almost comical indictment were it not for the fact that this rhetoric has been used to justify so much death and destruction, and, in Solomon’s words, “doesn’t bring back any of the people who died.” Since Vietnam, the media, both right-wing and left, have been complicit in selling the war. War Made Easy documents with alarming ease the clichés that our “leaders” use to sell and advance the cause of war, including popular classics like:

• We do not enter into this conflict lightly.
• War is inevitable.
• We are entering into this war to bring democracy to the people of [country name here], so that they will be free to govern themselves.
• We do not want war. We want peace.
• Withdrawal is an unacceptable option.
• We need to support our troops. (Conversely, those who don’t support our troops are traitors.)

In times of war, peer pressure has worked well to silence and ostracize those who “dissent,” that is, those who have not been suckered in by the rhetoric, poorly constructed arguments, logical fallacies and, yes, lies. The video examines the run-up to the Iraq war, and Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003 presentation* to the United Nations Security Council of “evidence” of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was accepted almost universally as “overwhelmingly conclusive,” and “devastating,” but was in fact, poorly researched, inconclusive and misleading. Among top journalists, only Phil Donahue questioned the research, and he was fired shortly thereafter. An internal memo from an MSNBC exec expressed concern that Donahue was not an appropriate spokesperson at a time when the administration needed support for the war. “We don’t want this to be a face of MSNBC as the United States goes into war.” Powell later said the speech was a “blot” on his political record and that he was a “reluctant warrior” who abetted the president in his quest to use deadly force in Iraq. The trend is not confined to the current situation. Solomon cites columnist Sydney Schanberg’s reminder of the media handling of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, and the media’s “unquestioning chorus of agreeability when Lyndon Johnson bamboozled us with his fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident.” Schanberg added: “We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth.”

*Ironically, the presentation is titled “Denial and Deception,” and is available on the White House web site.

Note: this post also appeared on my Eastwick blog.

Colin Powell, Gulf of Tonkin, Inconvenient Truth, Media Education Foundation, MSNBC, Phil Donahue, rhetoric, Sydney Schanberg, War Made Easy No comments