Social media platforms give governments, extremists, haters and propagandists the ability to excite and incite hate amplified by algorithms.
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I was blindsided a few weeks ago by a video of the New Zealand mosque massacre showing up on my screen — courtesy of Facebook. I really don’t have language to succinctly describe what it is, filmed by a self-described “fascist” hoping to pull viewers into his deranged hate-ravaged point-of-view, immortalizing the captured images of terror on his victims’ faces at the second their stolen lives flashed before them. The murderer also captured images of his victims and used them as a weaponized meme, which is now forever preserved as a cultural artifact. Making it was likely a driving force behind the massacre. This visual meme brought a white supremacist’s horrific battlefield into my home and the homes of millions of others who either willingly or unwittingly watched this horror. Welcome to World War F.

The Weaponization of Social Media, From Israel to Iraq

In 2014, the two millennia-old Iraqi city of […]