Thursday 25 April 2019

Abusive behaviour on Twitter and journalists

The pushback from journalists started on Tuesday with a story in the SMH by Jenna Price.  This was twinned on the same day by a story on the Inside Story website by ANU history academic Frank Bongiorno  The next day ABC breakfast show presenter Michael Rowland joined the chorus with his own story about abuse of journalists on Twitter.

None of this was a surprise to me, although it did seem a bit strange that it had taken so long for the troops on the other side to organise. I have been writing about this sort of abusive behaviour on this blog since the middle of last year, and not just about that, but also about how people use social media. The reason for this series of blogposts is that I think that what we are seeing in the contemporary public sphere is something that has not been seen before. Because everyone is a publisher the ground has changed its layout. There are hills where there used to be plains. There is a mighty river flowing through the landscape cutting a channel as it goes. The dinosaurs have perished and now is the age of the mammals.

I think the way many people on Twitter behave betrays a sense of disaffection with the mainstream, just like what people who vote for One Nation feel. Same dynamic, same types of violent views being expressed, which is surprising because most of the people who abuse journalists are on the left and would prefer, say, the Guardian to the Sydney Morning Herald. Some of them think that the ABC has been captured by the right and is not fulfilling its charter to reflect the views of the majority of Australians. Being themselves beholden to a particular, narrow ideological view of the world, they combatively see other things in their world as being beholden to the opposing view. They are blinded to the truth by their own way of seeing the world. And they jump at shadows all the time.

The “watergate” case shows how this happens. I wrote about the case on the blog yesterday in some detail. What happened in this case is that a push for more information about a water buyback that the government had conducted was started on social media by one individual and it gradually escalated as it was picked up by outlets in the mainstream, particularly by the Guardian. In the end, the government had to step in to stop the bleeding, declaring that an official enquiry would be held into all water buybacks conducted since 2008. They were fearful of the repercussions for the federal election, which is due in less than a month, if they did nothing about the noise that was coming out of Twitter.

Normally, the noise leads to nothing because the mainstream media picks up on the leads and looks at them in some detail and then puts the story aside. They might publish a story or they might not. Then the situation dies down out of a lack of corroborating detail. But how does the outrage that inspires these abortive investigations occur? It all comes down to perception.

When I was getting milk to put in my coffee yesterday I looked down to the vege bin (what some people call the “crisper”) in the bottom of the fridge and saw there what I thought looked like eggs. "What are eggs doing in the vege bin?" I thought to myself. Then I looked up and saw the eggs in the door and realised that what I had thought were eggs in the vege bin were actually potatoes. The ones I had bought at the supermarket on that day have reddish skins that look a bit like the brown shells of some eggs, and they were moderately-sized, just a bit larger than your average egg. This kind of thing happens all the time in the public sphere. People see something they think is a bit strange and they jump to conclusions, assuming that what they see is evidence of something untoward, such as corruption or graft by a public official. (And even though people are susceptible to this sort of error they are critical of police who practice "racial profiling", where the cops single out a person due to their age or appearance or their gender. People are a confused mess of contradictions and paradoxes.)

It's this messiness that you see on Twitter all the time. The poor spelling, the bad punctuation, the illogical segues, the non-sequiturs, the poor structure, the cliched expression. All evidence of a lack of education and of a general inability to function in a print environment. No wonder that journalists, most of whom have a university degree or two, and all of whom live with words, find it all a bit dismaying. The impulse to attack the media that you see all the time is however just another aspect of a more general sense of disaffection that people in the broader community feel and that makes them vote for outliers such as Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer. Now, of course, you also have Fraser Anning with his far-right lunacy that will attract votes in this upcoming election. Crikey journalist Bernard Keane wrote compellingly about these problems in a book that came out last year (and which I reviewed on this blog on 28 July).

But the solution to the kind of inequality that is fuelling society’s economic and political malaise is not being offered by either party. On the left, the Labor Party wants to tax people who have more money more heavily. On the right, the Liberal Party wants to give more bargaining power to employers. Neither of these things is a good idea, and in fact the constant switching between one extreme and the other is a big problem for our democracy and may in future have major repercussions for the entire electoral system, given the right circumstances. No. What we need is to take the best ideas from both sides and find a middle way that everyone can agree is a good idea. It is time for politicians to stop doing what they have always done – playing to their base – and for them to think of the whole community when they formulate tax or labour policies. They have to govern for everyone, not just a narrow slice of the electorate.

Without this kind of behaviour by politicians the country will just continue to swing from one side to the other and the people who really need help, people who are feeling excluded from “the system”, will become more and more extreme in their demands. Bad behaviour on social media will escalate. At the best of times there seems to be an inexhaustible supply of unhappiness that opportunistic politicians line up to corral and steer in order to fulfil their own agendas. Extreme emotions might suit demagogues like Fraser Anning but they can only be bad for the polity. We need sensible heads who truly represent the centre, not just craven ideologues who say they are in the centre but who, in actual fact, are just talking to a small section of the electorate. If the landscape has changed, if the mammals are now in charge, then we need a new type of politics to ensure that government can effectively respond to the new world we all live in.

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