Last week five people, including a Capitol Police officer, died in violence in Washington DC. You can debate how much Donald Trump's words counted as direct instructions or permission for what they did (those people focusing on the "you'll never take back your country with weakness" part are ignoring the "marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully make your voices heard" part), but the following things are indisputable:
- The current President of the United States lost the election.
- The current President of the United States then spent the next months lying about the election, saying that it was "rigged" and "fraudulent" despite losing dozens of court cases on those allegations.
- The current President of the United States promoted a rally in Washington DC to protest the results of the election, on the day that Congress was certifying those results. This was a "Save America" rally, where "patriots" had to travel to the nation's capital to "save their country".
- The current President of the United States spoke at the rally and repeated lies about the election being stolen from him.
- The current President of the United States, while people were dead or dying during the violence, and his supporters were inside the Capitol building saying they wanted to hang Mike Pence for treason, put out a video message addressing those supporters, ostensibly a call for peace but which included the words "we love you, you're very special".
- The current President of the United States then tweeted saying "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away." The election was not stolen from him, he lost.
- The current President of the United States was then banned from social media because his behaviour was deemed likely to incite further violence.
The President of the United States. The "leader of the free world". The "most powerful man in the world", did all of that. And this is an important point for me; nobody was shocked. People were disgusted, people were appalled, people were angry. But nobody is surprised. Because day by day, tweet by tweet, lie by lie, he has shown that he doesn't care about anything at all, apart from himself. And nobody did anything about it until it got to this point. And even now you wouldn't bet on Republicans voting for impeachment.
A lot of crazy shit has happened in the last few years, not just in America but around the world. We've all become a bit numb to it. To try and properly comprehend just how insane the above events are I think you have to try to reset your expectations to at least about five years ago. Try to think back to how things were five years ago, then go back through what Trump has done in the last couple of months, culminating in what happened last week, and imagine how you would have reacted to it. If it was a film you'd have dismissed it as far fetched.
Lies have been supersized and weaponised, and social media has allowed it to happen in the name of profit, with the excuse of freedom of speech. Trump has built a cult in plain sight. Covid deniers have shared dangerous lies about a deadly pandemic and convinced themselves, and some others, that it isn't real. And Facebook and Twitter let it happen. Now they've acted, too little, too late, by banning Trump, which has just poured fuel on a fire they helped build.
Where do we go from here? How do we fix this? Can it even be fixed? I think a good place to start would be for Facebook, Google etc to review their algorithms which show people only content that will reinforce existing opinions, and change them for ones that will show people things that actually challenge their views.
And I don't mean the crap that is passed off as "opinion" when really it is just lies. Real content, based on facts, that will make people question their views, rather than entrenching them and helping to divide everybody further, by actively and deliberately creating an echo chamber just to increase engagement from users so that you can sell advertising.
