By Michaela Gordoni
Is social media to blame for political violence? It seems so.
Political violence seems to be at its peak as President Trump experienced yet another attempt on his life at the White House Correspondents’ dinner on April 25.
“Those who constantly falsely label and slander the president as a fascist, as a threat to democracy and compare him to Hitler to score political points are fueling this kind of violence,” said White House Secretary Karoline Leavett. “The left-wing cult of hatred against the president and all of those who support him and work for him has gotten multiple hurt and killed, and it almost did again this weekend.”
According to Fox News, there have been ten known attempts on Trump’s life in as many years.
CEO for Center for Countering Digital Hate Imran Ahmed said, “We’ve seen both and an increase in political violent rhetoric on social media platforms and, actually, in the last year or so, it has exploded after many of the major social media platforms, including Meta… After Mark Zuckerberg…removed the guardrails on violent political rhetoric. We saw a huge increase in threats, hate and toxicity against politicians on both sides.”
AI chatbots also lack guardrails, and many engage in dangerous political rhetoric based on user prompts. Ahmed’s organization did a study and found out that “nearly every mainstream” chatbot will help a child plan a school shooting if asked.
“It will tell them what makes of glass and metal to use for shrapnel,” he explained. “So we have a real crisis with our technology… Unless we put up…sensible guardrails, transparency, accountability…if they are actually causing real-world harm, of course we are going to see a worsening of the situation.”
He believes young people are “being radicalized” through social media. It’s backwards. Instead of teaching kindness, children learn to do or say the worst things possible.
Fox Reporter Carly Shimkus said one in seven people believe there can be an excuse for political violence.
Democratic senior United States senator John Fetterman said, “In the strongest term I reject extreme rhetoric for anyone at this point. We really have to just again turn that temperature down. I mean, the president was shot in the head.”
“That was a quarter of an inch to the one side,” he continued. “We could have lost him there, too.”
Ahmed warned of America’s culture becoming angrier and more spiteful.
“It’s pulling it apart,” he said. “It’s effecting our young people in particular, and that’s why we’ve seen people that would never have been involved in this kind of thing suddenly being involved in the most atrocious acts of political violence.”
This issue isn’t localized to the US. Social media-influenced political violence has increased all around the world.
For example, Myanmar atrocities against the Rohingya people are fueled and justified through social media memes and propaganda. In Colombia, social media propaganda fuels hate toward political figures and discord among rebels and the government following its 2016 Peace Accord, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies reported.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate currently has a petition for those who want to challenge AI companies to prioritize public safety, as it continues to advocate for civil discord and safety on all platforms.
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