When a family is terrorised out of the country, how can we not accept there’s a problem?
NOT since Alexis Colby and Krystle Carrington had a full-on, hair-pulling, thigh-grabbing, dress-ripping, vase-flinging physical fight in Dynasty has there been anything quite like it.
The Coleen Rooney-Rebekah Vardy spat ignited on Wednesday and within minutes it was the most talked-about topic on Twitter, far ahead of Brexit, the Rugby World Cup and President Trump’s decision to pull US troops from Kurdish strongholds.
You know all the details by now, but what you might not have seen was the reaction on Twitter itself. Some comments were funny but equally, others were bilious and nasty and mostly aimed at Rebekah Vardy. Pregnant with her fifth child, she was reportedly forced to return early from a holiday in Dubai to address the accusations, a reminder that while lots of people were having fun at her expense, there were real-world consequences too.
Indeed, such consequences were exposed at exactly the time the Rooney shenanigans became public. Those of you who watch The Late Late Show will have seen the appearance last Friday by Fiona Ryan and her partner Jonathan Mathis. The couple were featured in one of those ads for Lidl which tells you how much you can save by shopping with the German discounter, which billed them as ‘the Ryans’. Mr Mathis was born in Brazil and grew up in Liverpool, and he and Ms Ryan have a 20-monthold son, Jonah.
Threats
This apparently was too much for one woman, who took to the social media site to tweet: ‘German dump @lidl_ireland gaslighting [winding up] the Irish people with their multicultural version of ‘The Ryans’. Kidding no-one! Resist the Great Replacement wherever you can by giving this kip a wide berth. #ShopIrish #BuyIrish.’
In right-wing speak, ‘the great replacement’ posits the theory that refugees and asylum-seekers will one day outnumber native populations, which clearly is ridiculous. Unfortunately, people who sympathise with this view, for the most part disaffected middle-aged men, are very easily manipulated, and immediately started threatening Mr Mathis and Ms Ryan online, to the point of issuing death threats. Fearful for their safety, the couple and their son moved back to England, run out of Fiona’s own country by her fellow citizens.
That is a pretty staggering conclusion to a single tweet, but far from an isolated incident. One prominent campaigner for improved autism supports also has been targeted and has received death threats online, and situations such as the planned direct provision centre in an Oughterard hotel are exploited to whip up protest and fear.
So what has Twitter – or Facebook, for that matter – done about this? The short answer is nothing. Hundreds of people reported the original tweet and were told it violated Twitter’s community standards. It was removed but the woman who posted it was allowed to remain on the site.
When quizzed before an Oireachtas committee about what any sane person saw as an utterly pathetic response, Twitter’s European director of public policy, Karen White, generated more fudge than a Cadbury production line. While sympathising ‘with anyone who has been subjected to harassment and threats’ that were ‘abhorrent and unacceptable’, Ms White said Twitter had robust policies in place to deal with such vitriol.
In fact, where once it actually did ban people who used abusive, racist or threatening language, Twitter now merely deletes individual tweets or suspends users for short periods, justifying this by saying they merely would migrate to other platforms instead of being challenged on their views. That sounds like a fairly personal definition of unacceptable, when something either is or it is not. We reasonably can assume Twitter errs on the side of acceptable, even when a user clearly is defying all the usual norms of public discourse and the current lukewarm law against hate speech.
Twitter by no means is alone. Facebook is notorious for allowing similar abusive content and has admitted it did not do enough to shut down vile comments about executives in Quinn Industrial Holdings in advance of the savage kidnapping and assault of chief operating officer Kevin Lunney, but it is incredibly prurient about any displays of flesh. Many is the mother who posted an innocent picture of breastfeeding her baby, only to find the site had taken it down.
Indeed, this week, it banned the advertising of a new history of Glenstal Abbey because the publisher posted an image of a male nude painted by one of the monks. This is an artistic work in the grand tradition of Renaissance painting, which frequently depicted men and women in advanced stages of undress. For Facebook, the human body, even depicted in a non-pornographic way, apparently is a greater threat to society than the stoking of fear, video footage of children being smacked and beaten, teenagers kicking eight shades of you-know-what out of each other, and live-streamed terror attacks.
When a gunman in Christchurch in New Zealand attacked two mosques and shot dead 51 people last March, the entire incident played out interrupted for 17 full minutes on Facebook Live, and the company meekly defended itself by saying it didn’t stop the broadcast because none of the 200 people watching reported it as it happened. It subsequently had to remove 1.5million shares of the massacre footage.
There is a bleak amorality to all this, a detachment that borders on nihilism, and it has been made possible by one thing and one thing only – the social media sites have for years hidden behind a lie. They claim they merely are platforms, not publishers, and therefore are not responsible or accountable for content, unlike those of us in traditional media, who can be hauled before the Press Ombudsman, the Press Council or the courts if we print anything defamatory or in poor taste.
While denying the obvious, the social media companies rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue every year from advertising, which they actually do publish. So which is it – are they publishers or not? Because it is some feat to sell advertising without taking responsibility for content.
Targeted
As Fine Gael’s Colm Brophy said at the Oireachtas committee, they have ‘pulled off a trick’ by getting people to view them as intermediaries when in fact they are publishers and until the social media giants are made accountable on that basis, many more people like the Mathis Ryans will be run out of their homes. New arrivals to this country will be targeted for their race and religions. Children and adults alike will be bullied, and the fearmongers and peddlers of hate will be free to continue with their campaigns of abuse and allowed raise spectres that appeal to base populism among those who feel they somehow have been left behind.
So while, yes, even I was entertained by the Rooney/Vardy contretemps that so publicly played out on Wednesday, what I really should have been doing was focusing on the Oireachtas.
Because there, also in full public view, social media admitted that no matter what harm it causes, to individuals or minorities, it simply doesn’t care. There is too much money to be made, and collateral damage is inconsequential – even when it comes in the form of a young family terrorised into leaving our country.