How dangerous can a single status update from an established news network or media professional be? Only a couple of days before, India witnessed mass hysteria because of a news circulation online. The news contained a shallow story about the lack of availability of salt and how its prices were going to skyrocket.
One thing led to another, and before anyone could contain the rumors, it had penetrated the lives that existed beyond the ecosystem of social media. This led to the sale of salt at a price that was ten times the usual amount and also caused enough disruption for people to link it with the demonetization policy that had been introduced by the government a couple of days before that. Turns out, a rumor about the lack of supply of salt led people to develop an opinion against black money, even when the relation between the two was like the one shared among Kejriwal and intelligence. This was just a single event among the many that India has witnessed in the recent past. However, in the last one year, the media in United States has successfully surpassed their Indian contemporaries in what one can term as a deceitful use of social media to propagate Democratic agendas and more importantly a Presidential candidate.
Today, Donald Trump, or the President-Elect, is joyously attributing his victory to the social media. However, had the story been a little different, he wouldn’t have kept himself from blaming the defeat to the same medium. From the day Trump announced himself as one of the candidates for the Republican nominations, he was mocked, and not just by people, by celebrities, by intellectuals, and by people in positions where they could influence the masses online. In the beginning, no one took him seriously, and the media around the globe hardly acknowledged his presence, using the image of his magnificent buildings as a reference to what they thought was just some random businessman trying his luck. Once the nomination came, things got a little serious. While the Trump bashing increasingly continued, his rival was hailed as the next President of America. The FBI investigation, or any news pertaining to Clinton’s illegal dealings in the past was not important, but the nude images of Trump’s wife, from a modelling shoot she did years ago made it to the front pages of New York’s daily newspapers, and eventually, social media.
As the election progressed, the Democratic women were portrayed as ‘more equal’ than the Republican ones, be it the party spokespersons, supporters, and as it turned out, the people who were going to vote. Voting for Hillary did not become a matter of choice, but a question of saving America, or so the Mainstream Media projected. Celebrities from our favorite Netflix and HBO Shows stood up to what they thought was an approaching end of America. Even the American Muslims, who were at ease when the Middle East was bombed for oil by Bush and Obama, felt insecure by the prospects of Trump. To put it in a subtle manner, Trump was shamed in every possible way online by the Mainstream Media to help Clinton win.
The words, phrases, articles, and blogs, they were used to demean, insult, and abuse Trump without a single filter, and yet, the unthinkable happened, and the question is how?
You do a negative piece about a personality once, it’s news. You do it twice, it’s major news. Thrice becomes an opinion, and anything that exceeds that becomes an inclination that has been paid for, and this is what went wrong with Clinton’s plans to demean Trump online. Users, not just Americans, but people across the globe were able to see through the shallow reporting online by the mainstream media. What had earlier begun as bashing turned into despicable behavior by the media personalities. Some went ahead and called the supporters of Trump as racists, bigots, mentally unstable (Clinton was one of these). Eventually, social media was harnessed by the Trump supporters to inject some truth about the rival candidate, and most importantly their own. The shallow reporting complemented by the pointless cribbing and ranting of celebrities was overthrown by raw facts that came from the supporters of Trump. While Clinton had thought she could use social media to reduce Trump to virtual ashes, her own existence, both real and virtual, in political terms, was reduced to nothing but trash. Social Media had defended itself through users who wanted to look beyond projections, who wanted to see the truth, and who were tired of the liberal ranting that was good on paper and poor in implementation. What America witnessed online was a repeat telecast of what India had achieved in 2014, the similarities being uncanny only on the media front.
Is Social Media the new Mainstream media. The answer is yes, an absolute yes.
However, it’s inception can be attributed to the failure of TV Mainstream media, which through its weak and paid for reporting both on TV and social media has led to the coming together of bloggers, writers, and many other young news networks who are willing to see news for what it is, as news, and not a bunch of words to manipulate people and eventually election results. After Trump’s victory, Americans inclined towards the Left came out in huge numbers, some carrying banners against Trump, and other calling for a collective to effort to rape the next FLOTUS; so much for being backed by money, media, and celebrities. However, they were all exposed, ruthlessly, and in every possible manner. What emerged was truth, perhaps a little distorted, a little skeptical, and yet, the closest entity to truth. Social Media now harbors people, bloggers, internet news networks (that have no existence on TV, and probably never will), and they are now making a case for themselves as the future of mainstream media in a domain that has replaced television when it comes to time spent by the users.
How much Zuckerberg may claim, the mainstream media doesn’t operate in mysterious ways online. Through the power of money, users are brought on to the company’s page. As these media outlets endorse specific celebrities (the ones that agree with their agenda), the same celebrities witness a rise in the count of their own followers on Facebook and Twitter. Before one knows, they are branded as intellectuals (like that ‘Hippopotamus’ from AIB, my FoE, folks!), and gradually, their single status update about anything, even beyond the realms of their profession or IQ, becomes the news. This is what exactly transpired during the recent Elections as celebrity ranting about moving to Canada and saving the country increased. Suddenly, the candidature of Hillary Clinton was not seen as that of a Presidential Candidate but that of a woman. The election became a den of feminist movements that hadn’t been able to achieve a great deal of success so far. The same has been witnessed in India when the tolerance card was played and corrupt Party Presidents were hailed as widows who sacrificed their families for the country to violence, though there is no mention of the failures in domestic or foreign policy that led to those unprecedented sacrifices.
All this leads to a fake projection, the one people have to accept, because most of the people with an intelligent opinion are without dumb followers, and hence, there is no endorsement, and no coverage. Fortunately, all this is changing. People, at least the ones willing to accept a change are looking beyond the media networks, and this trend has been on a magnanimous rise in India and America. Social media, in its own domain, has given birth to a new mainstream media that is raw, detests the status quo, and more importantly, trades in truth and facts.
The new mainstream media has a name too, at least in India. ‘Trolls’, the weakest defense that liberals could come up with after their leaders were bashed in the 2014 National Elections, are projected as people with zero civic sense, lack of respect for women or secularism, and looked upon as people who are not equipped with the necessary IQ to decide what’s good for the country. For the conventional mainstream media, the strength lies in discarding the new one as people who can’t be taken seriously, are not fit for the any government office (since they aren’t born with a political silver spoon), and therefore, there is a continuous attempt in the conventional MSM to demean the new front of news and truth.
The foxes who called the grapes sour are now looking for a methodology to evaluate the existing state of affairs on Facebook, and all this because Clinton in America and Congress in India lost. Given how their own weapon has backfired, they are now looking to turn the battlefield into their own tea-garden. In the future, could we see a crackdown of Facebook on voices that go against the status quo, and liberals, and the Leftist politics everyone in an influential position is mad about? The answer is yes, we could, as evident by the poor answer monitoring policy on Quora, the usual bans on Facebook, and suspensions on Twitter. The new mainstream media is fighting in a battlefield that is not entirely its own, and yet, it must continue to resist the power of money that nourishes the previous MSM.