Covington outrage shows danger of mobs
Don’t add your uninformed opinion to social media din
It had all the trappings of a major scandal: Video of a large group of young white Catholic school boys, many of them wearing Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” hats, apparently taunting an elderly Native American man at the Lincoln Memorial. The young men appeared to be bullying, intimidating and ridiculing the older gentleman, with one boy standing close and smirking while numerous others hollered and hooted around him. It was, on its face, a disgraceful display of nastiness, the sort of thing that would quite reasonably enrage anyone.
But it wasn’t that simple. The full footage of the event is confusing and for the most part appears to exonerate the boys. As the lengthy video shows, the incident arose due to a bizarre extremist black religious group that had been spewing invective about “faggots” and “crackers,” some of it directed at the students. For much of the time, the students stand at a distance; after a while they move closer and begin a series of school cheers to counter the group’s bizarre street ranting. The interaction between the two is harmless.
The Native American man, Nathan Phillips, told the Detroit Free Press he believed the “beastly” teenagers were “attacking these four black individuals" and he intervened. The interaction between the boys and Phillips followed, with Phillips beating his drum in front of them for a few minutes. The footage suggests they responded to his presence with goofy, jocular warmth. The most offensive sight is several students doing a stereotypical “tomahawk chop,” a rude and disrespectful gesture to be sure. But overall, the students behaved unremarkably.
The initial media narrative — that the boys had targeted, mobbed and harassed a Native American man in some hateful display of racism and white supremacy — appears to have been woefully misguided.
‘No one need ever forgive him’
By the time the full footage surfaced, the fury of viral social media had already done its damage. On Twitter, the writer Reza Aslan posted a picture of the apparently smirking teen, later identified as Covington Catholic High School junior Nick Sandmann, and said: “Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?”
Comedian Patton Oswalt called the students “bland, frightened, forgettable kids who'll grow up to be bland, frightened, forgotten adult wastes.” Writer Michael Green said of Sandmann: “A face like that never changes. This image will define his life. No one need ever forgive him.” Huffington Post reporter Christopher Mathias compared the students to violent segregationists. Comedian Kathy Griffin called for them to be doxxed: “Name these kids. I want NAMES. Shame them.”
And that is just a small sampling from the Twitter accounts of the famous. Thousands of everyday people joined in a comprehensive smear campaign of young men who may have done little or even nothing wrong.
This needs to stop. Our social media dystopia has to end. These online services, while admittedly fun and sometimes useful, have also brought out the worst in many of us. We are regularly in the midst of full-blown social media mob incidents, where underinformed pundits and commentators rush to the quickest of snap judgments before the facts are barely known.
Internet can ruin lives
What’s frustrating is that, in this age of instant digital information, we often get a fuller picture of incidents like these within a matter of days or even hours. Gone are the times when substantive news updates only occurred on evening broadcasts or with the morning newspaper. If you hold off on joining a social media mob, you can probably expect more information before the day is out, and save yourself from targeting innocent individuals.
This sort of thing isn’t just unpleasant for a minute or an hour; it can ruin lives. It is indeed very possible that Sandmann will be remembered for a long time; that image of him may very well “define his life” for years to come. This was troubling enough when the story first broke. Now that it seems the event may have been wildly mischaracterized, the possibility is horrifying. Imagine being known as a despicable racist for a decade or more because of a brief, confusing incident that occurred when you weren’t old enough to vote.
There is no need to broadcast an uninformed opinion about a complicated event. You can wait. We all can. The other option, of course, is to join the hordes of furious internet users, cursing and smearing and blaming people whom you’ve never met and pronouncing confidently on incidents with which you are not familiar at all. This sort of behavior is destructive, and hateful, and ultimately pointless. And, of course, one day it could be you on the receiving end of it. Better to stop it now.