Community social media groups and extremism
Community social media groups have outlived their usefulness.
That’s a bold statement to make, but let me clarify.
They are largely run by admins who:
Pretend what they choose is and isn’t “political” isn’t actually a political choice;
Have no knowledge or training in the nuanced ways that extremists use community social media groups, and flat out refuse to get any training;
Refuse to acknowledge the fact that their communities already have certain biases, and that by refusing to allow them to be challenged, they are only contributing to the problem;
And all too often, consistently try to silence people with legitimate concerns about the community whilst allowing bigots to run rings around them.
Just recently we’ve seen how Reddit and the My Little Pony fandom have had to acknowledge extremism in their midsts and deal with it properly, after years of denying it was ever a problem.
But it always was a problem, and thankfully those groups are beginning to think about acknowledging that fact and do something about it.
Community social media groups are a hotbed for hatred masquerading as “just how things are”, or as “apolitical” when they are already very political.
They get to choose what is and isn’t “political” based solely on the way-too subjective (and mostly uninformed) opinions of the admins – who, again are not trained in the nuanced ways extremists use social media bubbles and who refuse to ever be educated in that respect.
I don’t have any solution to this, but I’m calling it out because they thrive on people not recognising or accepting this fact or challenging them on it.
Community social media groups have a MASSIVE problem with bigotry, and their admins don’t want to do anything about it, and the social media companies are happy to keep it that way.
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