A fine line

As the pieces of shrapnel continue to whizz past our ears from the on-going Facebook bombshell involving a shady British firm, Cambridge Analytica, that has mined private information from no less than 50 million users without their knowledge, the more peo

This can be seen from the perspective of both the social media and the everyday exchange of political thought. Last week, three high-profile activists of the right-wing group “Generation Identity” were banned from entering the UK and even held in so-called detention centres only months after the group had opened its British section. Free speech? They have of course been dishing out the venom on social media having had to face fierce left-wing opposition from irate “Antifa” members at public meetings and rallies. Hate speech at both ends?

All the social media rumpus circumnavigating our lives today simply shows how humanity has decidedly gone by the old Maltese maxim of “iddaħħal il-lifa’ f’ħobbok” (loosely explained as placing the poisonous viper into your own bosom). What once was reserved for the beer-box platform on the party lorry at bleak corner meetings attended by a score of bored and boring followers has been turned into a global hurricane. This has shockingly given Americans their Donald, the Brits their Brexit, Italians their current extreme right-wing conundrum, while sustaining many other not so plausible plots and subplots across the world.

What is undoubtedly a wonderful instrument of communication almost two decades into the 21st century is now also a highly dangerous weapon of mass destruction. It is not ruled or regulated by ideology, but by economic and financial considerations. The horrific Facebook revelations have shown, for example, how both Democrats and Republicans have exploited it in the US. Just thinking about what has been done and is being done in the war zones of the Middle East and elsewhere gives one the shivers. It is not just fake news and fake pictures, but also fake experts and correspondents, fake stories from the frontline and fake actions and reactions, fake bloggers, fake developments and other fake things that include theatrical re-enactments, as was the infamous picture the unfortunate Syrian boy whose face was later discovered to have been made up with fake blood. Hate speech in photographic horror mode.

It is impossible to bring this spiralling globe to a halt, give it a sensible break, or give it a breather, because everyone everywhere is doing it, of course at different levels of pace and persuasion and in different scenarios. Everyone is screaming about the right to free speech just as everyone howls in protest when the hate bits are removed or when someone understandably opts to take legal action against them. The examples are multitudinous, many also on the local front where we have witnessed people taking exception to the fact that someone says enough is enough and chooses to take court action over things written about him or her. Why? Because in the digital psyche it seems you are expected to treat free speech and hate speech as the same. They are not. Free speech is a right to cherish. Hate speech is a bullet between the eyes.

Free speech carries with it the burden of personal responsibility. If you let it transmute into hate speech, as it can so easily do and as we have unfortunately seen happening in most electronic news online and blogs, local and foreign, you should not expect the injured parties to smile back and say thank you. To take a metaphorical page from the current