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Saturday, November 26th, 2016

 

Social media shake the world

A quarter of the globe population is on Facebook. Social media start to rule the world. It’s time to prepare for interesting times – urges Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times. In his article “Social Media’s Globe – Shaking Power” he mentions the last decision of Google and Facebook – to prohibit sites that traffic in fake news from making money off lies. That seems to be a good idea. But the reason of this step is clear: the election of Donald Trump.

In opinion of his antagonists the reason of this election is obvious: the lies about Democrats’ candidate, Hillary Clinton that has spread around the net.

In fact, it is the power of social media itself that helped Trump gaining votes. Mainstream media were against him. He had troubles with the financing and formal political expertise. But social media “have subsumed and gutted mainstream media. They have undone traditional political advantages like fund-raising and access to advertising. And they are destabilizing and replacing old-line institutions and established ways of doing things, including political parties, transnational organizations and longstanding, unspoken social prohibitions against blatant expressions of racism and xenophobia.”

As social networks help people to communicate more freely. in the case of Trump, they were able to speak openly about the themes that were forbidden in the oficial discourse, that were politically incorrect.

Brexit is another example of networking the groups of people that were marginalized by the offical media. And the ISIS searching for new members is one more, the scary one. The social media revolution is unpredictable and thus fascinating.