News first. Climate activist Greta Thunberg has strongly condemned social networking site Facebook for being irresponsible. According to Greta, many "sad lies and conspiracy theories" are circulating about her on the platform. However, Facebook, while “could have easily dealt with” the libel against Greta, “does not want to take responsibility.”
For this, Greta may punish Facebook with a boycott. Moreover, the network "allows hate speech and lies" in relation not only to Thunberg herself, but "and thousands of other people."
Recall that critics in social networks call Thunberg a PR project promoted by green energy lobbyists. A well-known German politician recently even thickly protested the public, suggesting that she is a puppet of the Russians. In this regard, the leading media urge everyone to protect Greta from bullying - and even promote a special hashtag for "psychological support for girls and women who speak out about the climate."
What's interesting for us.
First, if the international moral authority Thunberg publicly threatens the billionaire Zuckerberg with reprisals, then the very idea of social networks is in crisis.
Remember: nine or ten years ago, the role of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in Western media was not just positive - it was almost heroic. After all, it was the “young people with smartphones” who freely communicate on Facebook and Twitter who did an unambiguously good deed - they started the “Arab Spring”. They may even be about to topple the authoritarian regime of Putin, which is trying to restore the influence of his fragile empire. Young people bravely post denunciation of their regimes on social networks, and they cannot be shut up. And they can also coordinate their actions and not keep up with the clumsy servants of the regime, and all that.
At the same time, in 2010-2013, none of the moral authorities in the West cared whether activists in Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Ukraine were writing the truth in their accounts.
Did "the regime's servants have just captured twenty students, maim and kill them right now, gather on the square and beat off ours !!!!"
Promotional video:
Is it true that the damned tyrant in the mansion has gold plumbing, inlaid with iPhones?
Isn't it a fake that the tyrant has already summoned the Israeli special forces (also known as Moscow, Chechen and others) to suppress his own people.
These questions did not move anyone in the homeland of social networks for a banal reason. The "victims of freedom" then were bad, wrong states and bad, wrong people.
Everything changed dramatically, as you know, in 2016, when the victims of social networks were advanced democracies and their leaders. When it turned out that Twitter and Facebook are tools that can not only destroy yet another Middle Eastern country or drop Eastern European presidents. But also the tools that can be used to wrestle, for example, Britain from the European Union, and the American presidency right from the beak of Hillary Clinton, who is worthy in all respects. Moreover, it turns out that some indistinct "Russian trolls" can do it for a penny.
Since then, there has been an ongoing battle for the right to control social media - and the further, the more fierce. The progressive liberal forces advocating for freedom are trying to silence, or better to stifle the voices of their opponents. Democratic politicians are trying to ban Trump's Twitter account through the courts (otherwise he has too many readers). Everywhere "patrols of time" rush: specially assembled assault forces of activists are sent into the past, seek out statements from opponents of many years ago, which are now forbidden, and cut opponents out of the present. Zuckerberg travels to make excuses to the US Congress as to work. Social networks from a collective hero to a collective bully, persecutor, abuser and sexist pig.
The second nuance is even more interesting.
Greta Thunberg was not in vain chosen by the managers of eco-activism as the walking “voice of a generation”. In it, in a poster-exaggerated form, not only are the advanced beliefs offered to her peers, but also the advanced character traits offered to them are collected. Greta - a behavioral model for earthlings of the early 2020s
Of course, not all the generation of today's 16-25-year-old earthlings is like Greta. It's just that “Tunberg” features are actively promoted as appropriate and socially approved.
In order not to be unfounded, I will cite several recent articles.
“How to stay healthy while working in the office?”, “Enterprising and depressive: how gadgets influenced the thinking of a generation and who made money on it”, “Where to go to cry and dispel the autumn melancholy in Moscow”, “Acceptance of your body and experience of love failures”, "How to survive the death of a loved one?", "Who are the engineers and why are they so defenseless."
This is not a magazine I cited for sad, overweight elderly widows. I went to a popular youth resource. All the headlines and announcements given from there, and for just one last week.
That is, vulnerability, hypochondria and whining, and panic pessimism, and whining, and complaints about bullying in social networks and the oppression of gadgets, and whining are the most relevant, according to fashion media, the image of a student and a young professional. The same generation, which, simply by virtue of biological youth, seems to be obliged to rebel and do outrageous nonsense under the influence of hormones.
But it does not even rebel without getting up - like "environmental radicals" in London, lying in the path of public transport (here we have a unique example of a public movement that does not require any movement).
… And so. Now the flagship of this vulnerable, defenseless, asocial generation has issued an ultimatum to the social network, which largely gave birth to this generation. This is instructive in itself, but the brightest is not even that.
In fact, Greta's generation demands tolerance, respect, reasoning, and polite communication from social networks.
That is, everything that it is completely devoid of itself.
And if the social networks bend under the heat, then they have a risk of degenerating into a dictatorship of hysterical infantiles, who will be freed from the usual rules of human ethics, as a kind of superior race, by what they are for a just cause.
Author: Victor Marakhovsky
