New Age Propaganda

Saycheese TV doesn't care about black people.

This article is something that has existed in my head in some way, shape or form since July 13th of this year. For those reading who have forgotten what took place on that date in question, it was the day of the (first) failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump while he was speaking at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. However, the event in and of itself has nothing to do with anything I’m going to say. Which might seem strange seeing as there’s a wealth of things just within that assassination attempt and the ensuing Donald Trump fist pump which are worthy of an article, but they’ve already been written really. What I personally found most harrowing interesting was the reaction online to the shooting, specifically on X (formerly known as Twitter).

Donald Trump being compared to 50 Cent, two symbols of American Exceptionalism.

On one hand, you had reports and updates flooding in from reputable news sources and journalists alike confirming the facts and fiction around the situation, such as where the shooter was, the extent of harm (or lack thereof) inflicted on the presidential candidate, the people in the stands that died, and if anything about the identity of the shooter pointed to potential motivations for something as brazen as an assassination attempt. But if you were online for the ensuing hours after the shooting, you know that the actual reporting was a minority in the face of what can only be described as another night at the travelling media circus that Elon Musk has decided to bankroll.

Memes depicting Donald Trump as 50 Cent, one liner tweets from people trying to cash in on their daily dopamine dosage from receiving engagement and, oddly or not oddly at all depending on what you think of the average person, conspiracy theories swirling around about the possibility of the entire thing being staged, in spite of the very real corpse of Corey Comperatore who was inadvertently killed. Millions of people threw their hat in the ring with an opinion, thinkpiece or quip to capitalise on the event of the moment. On its face, this is completely normal internet behaviour that predates Elon Musk’s takeover of the app by at least a decade. Why wouldn’t people talk about an assassination attempt after all? However, the changes in social media that have occurred over the past decade mean that nights like these no longer become nights for the average person to chime in, and instead, become opportunities for the intentional mass spread of ideology in a way that wasn’t even feasible in an age past. 

The number one change over the past 15 years of course, would be the change of social media morphing from a place for people to stay in touch with people they know and connect with those they don’t, to a place for ‘content’. Content meaning, any media posted with the express purpose of engaging and/or entertaining a target demographic. That is to say, I am old enough to remember when the social media platforms that we know as titans today such as Youtube, Twitter, Instagram and more recently Vine Musically Tiktok were in their primitive stages. In those times, nobody knew exactly what would garner engagement. It was, for the most part, people throwing [redacted] at a wall for the sake of it. There wasn’t yet a widespread accepted idea of a separation between what you see online and reality, because social media was primarily used to document reality. Now, obviously, it’s never been further from that. Most things you see on social media are made specifically with engagement in mind, due to the new additions of ‘content creator’ and ‘influencer’ to the tier of infinitely lucrative jobs that require no qualifications to succeed at, now immortalised in the minds of children with roles such as being a rapper, actor, movie star, footballer, or princess. With this shift, has come maybe the most influential of every single type of influencer, the proverbial cream of the crop, the meme page.

The meme page is one of our points of entry for a problem that has been made painstakingly clear in the past half a decade if never at any point before. Social media accounts dedicated to jokes is the most innocuous concept one could think of. A place where the followers and the creators all bond over a love of poking fun at the world at large, isn’t any harm done to anyone surely? 

Naturally, the answer to such questions is never answered so simply once you bring the matter of monetization to the forefront. Sometimes in the mid-2010s (the exact year can be argued but I’m saying 2017), the people who would start meme pages began to figure out two things. The first being that, if you have a big enough platform, you can monetize it. This is law irrespective of what you choose to build your platform off. The second would be that nothing gathers up a platform quite like political content, or more specifically, political content that you can laugh at due to its perceived absurdity and the views those who consume it will go on to have confirmed for them. 

Thought exercise: Stop reading this article, go to your browser and type in ‘Feminist Getting Owned’. How many of these videos have over a million views? Now understand that these videos are made with two reactions in mind. The first, being the man/teen/child that earnestly consumes this content because of an insecurity soothed or a deep-seated hate for women. And then we have the other reaction; righteous fury from those that disagree and engage with it in order to berate the creators and consumers alike for the purposeful misrepresentation of feminism and women as a whole. This is a specific example, but the framework can be extrapolated to absolutely any and every social and political problem you could think of. In essence, ragebait is all the rage you know? 

In the past few years, I think it's not a reach to say that the general public has gotten a taste for how social media can be used to further agendas and movements à la the main few such as the red pill movement, the Divest agenda and so on and so forth. But what I also believe is that because of the more outward and obvious examples of vitriol being spewed by figureheads for engagement, what’s flown under the radar has been a steady creep to what can only be described as propaganda by pages that are, seemingly, innocuous. Like meme pages. Or ‘rap news’ pages. Or pages that call for a ‘return for tradition.’ All pages that present as news sources or just indulging a userbase with specific niche interests, but really don a masquerade that you don’t even have to peer that hard at to see what their true intentions are. When was the last time MyMixtapez posted about someone’s mixtape and not used a public figure’s personal life as fodder for an audience that seeks arbitrary examples to confirm their personal (always right-leaning) biases?

The open embrace of facism in general has been on the rise globally within the past 5 years, and the effects of such reverberate through all the media we consume online. It’s hard not to notice that on X, where 5 years ago a police killing caught on camera posted would illicit a reaction that resembles something more human from its users, whereas today in the case of Sydney Wilson, when you search her name you see nothing but pages with the blue tick that now symbolises monetisation, spreading images and tweets that all but flaunt a thinly-veiled abhorrence for all black people. Pages on pages of ‘content creators’ using death to confirm their own beliefs that, put lighter than anything I read, black people deserve to die. Thanks again Elon. 

I suppose somewhere within this rambling I lost the articulate argument that I would have had if I had written this article in July like I had planned to before writer’s block claimed me. But I also don’t think I ever had one really, because usually the points in my articles are solutions. Or what people should do. But with something as pervasive as this, I must say for the first time all I really am left with at the end of this writing is concern. Whereas news reporting on TV, print and radio are things that many people of varying levels of intelligence understand to be biased propaganda with the express aim of maintaining the status quo the ruling class has so carefully orchestrated through decades of trial and error, it seems that pages on the social media apps the average person spends hours engaging with in earnest are still looked at as if they are escapes from reality. As if Mark Zuckerburg doesn’t run apps that are actively restricting the reach that people reporting on genocide have while he and Elon Musk increasingly give free reign and boosts to the charlatans and opportunists who seek to do nothing fan the flames of fanatic hate until it reaches the type of boiling point that results in events like this summer’s UK race riots we seem to have conveniently shut out of our memory in order to make space for the next bit of violence to consume. I say all this to say that I truly, truly do worry for the future.