Social media is fully weaponized, open discourse be damned
The Internet may very well be the innovation that liberated access to ideas, but the social media it spawned is swiftly evolving into the jackboot that suppresses them.
To put what’s happening today to an increasing number of editors into perspective – Ian Buruma of the New York Review of Books is just the latest victim – one has to go back to the pre-Internet days, when those of us within newsrooms were pretty much the only ones who knew what was and wasn’t in the paper or on the TV.
We spent our days scanning news wires for the information we thought was important and/or useful to our readers. We controlled the flow of information and people trusted us to do so in a responsible manner.
There were all kinds of interesting little decisions made every day that, in general, people didn’t know about. We never reported on suicides, for instance, because they inspired others to do the same. The editorial pages of one newspaper I worked for had, as many still likely do, banned commentary from anti-abortion perspectives. Others declared that the debate on global warming was over and skeptical perspectives would no longer be presented. This ensured that ideas within the ‘contentious social issues’ category didn’t inflame or divide public opinion as if, provided they didn’t appear in the paper, they didn’t exist.