Bullying and other forms of anti-social behaviour have been given vent by social media.
Last Sunday, I ruminated on the forcible inclusion of folks in WhatsApp groups for nefarious purposes. Many people, some of them known to me, advised me to change my WhatsApp settings to thwart those who would engage in such intrusive practices. I am thankful for the advice, but it missed the point. I know all that.
My point was that we need to re-engineer our brains to raise the cultural intelligence of Kenyans. The brain is often inert unless it’s trained to think and discriminate against what’s morally right or wrong. I am not talking about law, but basic moral rules of the road on social media. There’s a yawning normative gap. I want to develop that argument further.
It can’t be gainsaid that social media has democratised society and reduced the power of hegemonies over human agency. This is especially true among the marginalised social classes that have always been preyed on by malign elites. This isn’t to say that social media is an unqualified good. It’s not. There aren’t many scientific breakthroughs that don’t manifest a cancerous germ.
Take the airplane, for example. We can’t think of life without it, even though there was life before it. But the thing pollutes like crazy. It’s also been used to carry weapons of mass destruction and bomb population centres. On September 11, 2001, planes themselves were turned into missiles. Anything can literally become a double-edged sword.
Most advanced gun
What social media has done is put the most advanced gun – the pen – in the hands of anyone who’s literate and has access to an internet-capable device. By “anyone” I mean those with a sense of judgement and discretion, and those who don’t. The latter includes idiots, fools, those with an evil mind, and criminals. Both the former and the latter are capable of using social media for less than noble purposes.
But the latter are more likely to act with malice aforethought. This means that societies must teach the mind about what’s ethical, moral, and legal in the use of social media. It simply can’t be a jungle out there because it will reduce human happiness and prosperity rather than enhance them.
Already, we’ve seen a rise in suicides among teens in the US because of social media. Bullying and other forms of anti-social behaviour have been given vent by social media. Body-shaming and the most primitive epithets are the fare of cowards on online platforms. In Kenya, political protest moved online years ago. The Gen Zs have kicked the use of social media as a political weapon a notch up. Most of them have without doubt used it to make “good trouble.” But others have decided that all bets are off. We have seen them lampoon leaders by using morbid AI-generated images. In my view, that’s simply wrong. It’s repugnant conduct that detracts from the democratic project and legitimate protest.
Death and mayhem
I call the use of social media for illegitimate, immoral and unethical purposes extortion. Some use it to blackmail ex-lovers or to embarrass those who who’ve jilted them. I have seen folks posting unseemly material and pictures on social media just because they were denied the fruits of affection by a woman. I know of a case where a fellow blackmailed a woman into sexual relations which would’ve been denied without the “kompromat.” Society needs to decide which of this conduct warrants punitive sanction, and which is legitimate free speech. The use of social media to drive one to suicide should in my view be criminally sanctioned without pity. Society has to draw a line somewhere to mold and encourage sanity.
This means that social media apps themselves cannot be allowed to be wild savannahs where death and mayhem are regarded as OK. The biggest social media giants like Meta with WhatsApp, X (previously Twitter), TikTok, Instagram, and others must be accountable. Letting them unleash the darkest recesses of the human mind without any regard to safety is akin to allowing gun manufacturers to put a loaded weapon in every person’s hand, including the mentally ill, or those with dementia. I concede that this will not be easy, but we simply can’t throw up our hands in defeat and despair. We have recently seen the United States attempt to curb the use of Tik Tok by using the law for national security reasons.
Let me end where I started. Every society needs to have an intelligent conversation about social media and decide what’s legitimate, what’s appropriate, what’s ethical, what’s morally defensible, what’s legally acceptable, and what the consequences would be if any of the norms agreed upon were breached. Here, I err on the side of the caution. Societies shouldn’t overact and use a mallet to crush a fly. Democracy demands free expression. But at the same time, no society can prosper without law and order. That’s why we need a sober conversation devoid of threats, calumny, or heavy-handedness to re-engineer society.
Makau Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Margaret W. Wong Professor at Buffalo Law School, The State University of New York. On X: @makaumutua.
