Maybe Mos Eisley Isn’t all that Bad

Mos Eisley the spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.

Social media is often described as Mos Eisley from Star Wars, and rightfully so. There we find all of the world’s bad actors, trolls, button-pushers, traders in falsehood for cash, and other idiots and ne’er-do-wells who range on the scale of evil from bumbling to absolute.

But you can bet your boots if things got “so bad” in this country that the government took steps to shut social media down, folks would not react well.

Though the thinkers, or at least some of them, seem to think it’s a good idea.

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, writing at Slate.com, speaks of the government-sanctioned “shutdown” of social media in Sri Lanka following Easter Sunday attacks on Christians by purported Muslim extremists, and how cries of “Good” over the shutdown demonstrate Western ignorance of how things actually work outside of liberal democracies.

Wijeratne writes:

In the West, many praised the most recent social media block. Kara Swisher wrote in the New York Times, “When the Sri Lankan government temporarily shut down access to American social media services like Facebook and Google’s YouTube after the bombings there on Easter morning, my first thought was ‘good.’ … because it could save lives … because the companies that run these platforms seem incapable of controlling the powerful global tools they have built … so many false reports about the carnage were already circulating online that the Sri Lankan government worried more violence would follow.” Swisher acknowledges at the end of her column that “shutting social media down in times of crisis isn’t going to work.” But she seems unaware of the actual source of the problem here. 

The Sri Lankan government has tried all this before. It shut down social networks in March 2018, in response to riots targeting Muslims. In the events leading up to those attacks, the government didn’t do anything about the anti-Muslim hate speech peddled on social media by the far-right Buddhist organization Bodu Bala Sena and its affiliates; they’re monks, after all. This negligence is precisely what caused organized mob violence in the first plane. The government let hate speech run its course, then took the rug out from everyone—even, for some bizarre reason, blocking my own author website (my political blog was left intact)—and then blamed the scapegoat of the day, Facebook. Media attention was focused at the time on the role of Facebook in violence in Myanmar, and Western journalists lap this stuff up.

So we should count our blessings that our national media, though at times error-prone, isn't in thrall to the state.

Yet.

And we should take heart that our government, despite its many shortcomings, is not outright incompetent.

Yet.

So in the meantime, maybe we ought to put up with the shortcomings of our social media. It may spy on us. It may sell our information. It may make money off the crap we post. But at least the government isn't shutting it down and we're not forced to go to the bad actors of the internet for our news. Or our "news."

Yet.