This article originally appeared in The Line. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Peter Menzies, August 16, 2024
Social media is a problem but social media is almost always not the problem.
Britain has of late fallen into a very un-British state of rioting and civil disorder accelerated by false rumours passed along on social media. (The rioting, and its direct cause and historical roots, was discussed at length by Andrew MacDougall in The Line last week). British political leaders think cracking down on what people can say on Facebook and TikTok — the modern public square — will help end the strife, alongside a massive police response across the whole of the U.K. In today’s Canada, which is far from the one many of us grew up in, politicians are also hoping new legislation will help society be more cohesive.
We should avoid the temptation to recoil from the chaos in Britain and rush into more regulation of social media. The reality is that while Facebook, X/Twitter, TikTok and others can magnify and accelerate both the good and bad in our cultures, mobs of enraged people have been hitting the streets armed with torches and pitchforks to fight monsters — real and imagined — since the dawn of time.
The sooner media commentators and politicians get that through their heads and start addressing people’s feelings of cultural disconnection, the sooner social order will be restored in Britain. And the less chance there will be that Canadian cities will be similarly engulfed in scenes of street fighting between groups incapable of reconciling their differences.
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