For the digital herd, the internet thrives as coveted theatre. There, everyone deals on fancied wile.
There, we relive the infernal crud of frantic personae: the political animal, apolitical pacifist, hyperbolic ‘influencer,’ data-fabulous millennial, and the defiant Gen Z, scud to the shore of national consciousness on the World Wide Web.
Whatever the bent of their politics, they cuddle one prejudice and cringe from the other as their vanities dictate. Thus the endless clashes in defence and furtherance of banal bigotries or a desperate demagogue. Journalists, activists, rights activists, and failed political aspirants afflict our social space like pitiless hooligans.
They mistake lava for wit and molten banality for intellect. Their voices weigh like a thundercloud; whether debating celebrity scuffles or their political preferences, their passions sparkle and flit from fetid intelligence to brilliant witlessness.
There is a cult of ignorance knifing through Nigeria right now, ripping all that should bind us apart, particularly in cyberspace.
This strain of anti-intellectualism rifles through our sociopolitical and cultural lives, nurtured by the false notion that the freedom of speech means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’ or that ‘my malevolence is just as good as your benevolence.’
The malady manifests in cyberspace in real time. In this public space, everybody becomes a wilding, trading bitter realism, infantile whim, and pseudo-idealism with awful relish.
The guts and sinews of every stereotype and theme-park hatred are validated via mind-numbing sloganeering, toxic bigotries, sophistry, and outright lies.
A casual visit to Facebook or Twitter manifests as a pilgrimage: the esplanades of public discourse unfurl to a sordid, cutout version of anarchic thinking, replete with ethnoreligious bigotries and the hassle of incomprehensible logic. Then, there are the strange movements and morbid ideologies, all fostered and marshalled from bizarre platforms.
In this public wilderness, everybody pontificates. Everyone mutates from philosopher to savage pawn and vice versa; they all speak impressive and atrocious lingo. Call it our patois of rebuke and immoderate assemblies.
En route to the 2023 elections, we encountered Nigerians of vast mental stripes in our social space: the BATIFIED, ATIKULATE, AND OBIDIENT. Once you get past the facade of slogans and artifice, it’s mostly the same defiant, virulent passion driving the mob.
For journalists, the temptation is great: a witty phrase, piercing critique, or the now ubiquitous fearless truth often gets rewarded with a flood of likes, feverish retweets, and adulation. But what is lauded today may be cursed tomorrow, and the same voices that elevate at dawn may crucify before nightfall.
Thus, no magnitude of dopamine fulfilment or fleeting warmth of applause can justify the agony of toxic attacks by a malicious mob.
For ample illustration, shall we consider some cases overseas, of media personnel whose careers were made and marred on social platforms?
Consider, for instance, the sad case of Justine Sacco, who tweeted to her 170 Twitter followers in December 2013: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”
The joke, allegedly intended as a satire, cost her more than she bargained for. While she slept on the plane, a motley Twitter mob gunned for her jugular, unaware that Sacco’s post equally mocked her personal bubble of privilege.
That night, she trended ‘number one’ worldwide as the mob tweeted: “We are about to watch this Justine Sacco bitch get fired, in real time, before she even knows she’s being fired,” and “Everyone go report this c..t @justinesacco,” and so on, for a total of 100,000 tweets.
Sacco got sacked. Her employer, the IAC, the Barry Diller-owned parent of Expedia, Electus, The Daily Beast, among others, pandered to Twitter’s cancel culture. Jon Ronson, recounting Sacco’s ordeal in his book, “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” highlighted the injustice of her sack following her trial by a digital lynch mob.
Ronson asserted that supposedly nice people ‘like us’ sentenced Sacco to a year’s punishment in the unemployment arena over “some poor phraseology in a tweet, as if some clunky wording had been a clue to her secret inner evil.”
On July 30, 2017, Kevin Myers, arguably one of the most fearless and prolific Irish journalists, watched his over 40-year journalism career get destroyed on Twitter. All it took was a few minutes.
A digital lynch mob had gunned for Myers over a clumsy sentence in his unsparing column on the BBC’s gender pay gap. The incident presented a perfect opportunity for his enemies, during his illustrious career, to trigger a Twitter mob by twisting his text out of context and alleging that it was misogynistic and anti-Semitic.
Myers was neither, argued Ruth Dudley Edwards, among others who condemned the mob action that conveniently ignored the journalist’s antecedents. A few hours into his victimisation, Myers was sacked by his news medium.
For effect, Myers’ traducers dug up a 2009 article, with a headline cast (not by Kevin) by his employer with creative mischief: “I’m a Holocaust denier.” In tweeting the article, they mischievously left out the second part: “but I also believe the Nazis planned the extermination of the Jewish people.”
In the article, Myers espoused free speech and condemned the criminalisation of those who thought there had been no Holocaust. For this, he was declared a global pariah, even though he condemned the genocide of the Jews as “one of the most satanic operations in world history.”
Although he was eventually vindicated, nothing could compensate him for the terror he was subjected to by the Twitter mob and the loss of his job. In another incident, a once-respected essayist ended up driving for a food delivery app to make rent after he lost his job.
Writing anonymously in an American journal, he acknowledged his part in his macabre fate. “I mobbed and shamed people for incidents that became front page news,” he confessed, “but when they were vindicated or exonerated by some real-world investigation, it was treated as a footnote by my online community.” No one ever apologises for a false accusation, and everyone has a selective memory regarding what they’ve done, he said.
Upon reading Jon Ronson’s 2015 book, “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” the essayist revisited his Twitter archives and was shocked to discover that he had actively participated in the public shaming of Justine Sacco.
“For years, I was blind to my own gleeful savagery,” he notes, admitting that the social justice vigilantism he personified on Twitter and Facebook has no human depth. “It’s only when we snap out of it, see the world as it really is, and people as they really are, that we appreciate the destruction and human suffering we caused when we were trapped inside.”
Indeed, aggressive online virtue-signalling is a fundamentally two-dimensional act with rewards and consequences. The danger is rarely abstract. Across the world, journalists have discovered how swiftly an online audience mutates into a lynch mob.
Reports document a rising tide of harassment and threats, disproportionately aimed at those who cover subjects interwoven with right-wing identity anchors or who probe the delicate egos of populist leaders.
In Nigeria’s virtual space, this mob censorship is often masterminded by demagogues adept at weaponising the fury of the crowd to discipline truth-tellers. What begins as citizen vigilantism cum virtue-signalling, viral outrage, and hashtags soon morphs into a vindictive campaign to silence, punish, and ultimately erase the journalist who refuses to bend.
For many a journalist, social media manifests as that intoxicating agora, where reputation is minted at dawn and destroyed by dusk.
