Telling People What They Don’t Want to Hear; George Orwell and Social Media by Griselda Heppel

Katherine Roberts’s blog post a few days ago about the tyranny of social media struck a chord. Social media have changed our lives. 

First Facebook, whose friend connections at least made sense. I mean, it’s just another way of connecting with friends you have in real life, isn’t it? (IRL if you will… see what I did there? Oh heavens, two deeply irritating social media cliches in one go. Sorry.) Oh, and their relations, who you may have met. And their in-laws, who you definitely haven’t. And then… crikey who are these totally strange friends from round the world I’ve never come across before?

Photo by Leila Larochelle: https://www.pexels.com/photo/ white-and-brown-deer-standing-on-snow-10709569/

Then Twitter, which revolutionised everything. I remember when I first, tentatively, tweeted and followed other accounts. How amazing it was to connect with people I had absolutely nothing to do with and would never come across otherwise, not just in different parts of the UK but on different continents. 

Amazing… and weird. Someone in Canada points me to her blog on tracking animals in the snow. A museum curator on the other side of the world asks me to drop by if I’m ever in the country, wow, I don’t even know this guy and here I am, best friends! Yeah, yeah, we did all calm down eventually. But ordinary relationships were altered forever. 

And that was before the really nasty side of Twitter got going. The bullying, the threats, the pile ons, the cancelling. Turns out connections all across the globe are not so great if you’re not with the people who know they’re the Good Guys. 

With Katherine I yearn for the pre social media age. If only we were still back there and didn’t have to deal with all this. Yes, you can switch everything off and simply not take part. But then you’d miss out on the life-changing benefits as well. Like the friend who you lost touch with 25 years ago who contacts you on Facebook, and now you see several times a month, kicking yourself on all that time missed when you could have been sharing your lives. 

More controversially, social media will give you information that traditional news channels will not. It used to be that anything that really mattered to people - instances of injustice, prejudice and conflicting vested interests, say - would be aired and discussed in news and current affairs programmes with fair representation of the different parties affected. 

Not any more. The news channels simply ignore stories that make them nervous. Twitter may be riddled with rabbit holes, rumors and conspiracy theories but it will also flag up serious events you won’t find in the MSM (ooh, another social media coinage), at least not until the sheer volume of chatter online forces the Great and the Good (not) newscasters to address the story, often weeks after it’s happened, and then as glancingly as they can get away with. 

Bronze statue of George Orwell by sculptor Martin
Jennings. Outside BBC Broadcasting House, London.

In the West we used to take free speech for granted. I certainly did. It means hearing things you might find offensive and upsetting, which you can then counter as trenchantly as you wish. In 2017, the BBC erected a bronze statue of George Orwell by sculptor Martin Jennings outside Broadcasting House in London, with the writer’s famous words, ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people things they do not want to hear’ engraved on the wall behind. 

I wish it was the truth of this saying that leaps out at me first, not the irony of where it’s inscribed. 

Of course a line has to be drawn that prevents speech inciting violence, and until recently everyone seemed to understand this. University debating societies pitted speakers against each other on controversial topics, and people coped. Now, it seems, students have to be protected from views that don’t agree with their own. Visiting speakers accused of Wrongthink must be cancelled. The last government, for all its faults, passed a law obliging universities to uphold free speech, which Bridget Phillipson, the new education secretary, has just withdrawn, citing the dire risk that ‘this legislation could expose students to harm and appalling hate speech on campuses.’ No, it couldn’t, because hate speech is already illegal. All it would have meant is that students might occasionally be exposed to views they do not want to hear. To Orwell’s definition of liberty, in other words. How brittle that was. 

George Orwell

This, this is why I keep an eye on Twitter. Among all the nutcases, extremists, bad influencers, bullies and poison pens, there are some strong, clear thinkers who will give genuine information on topics the main news channels won’t touch for fear of upsetting people by making them hear things they don’t want to. Ye gods. Isnt that what journalists are meant to do? 

 

Orwell thought so.