Long time since we had a net2reality post here. I’ve been wanting to write one after the Croatian govt. caused all that fuss with the Facebook couple of weeks ago, but I figured it was covered enough by other medias.
However, there wasn’t so much talk about kids using the social media to promote nationalism, hate and fascism.
Some time later, there’s been a new facebook incident when a group celebrating Srebrenica massacre grew to over six thousand members. This also recieved some media attention, but again, there was no serious analysis of other hate groups on facebook.
What struck me as interesting is that the vast majority of members were not even born when the Yugoslavia breakup wars started and were still in pre-school when it all ended. So where do they get their ‘knowledge’ and information about the past from? Who makes the biggest influence on how they see the past – their parents, media, their friends, the whole society?
Recently a number of groups started popping up, this time instead of bashing other nationalities, members decided it’s time to target gay individuals, by posting their pictures, addresses and encouraging other members to suggest best ways to kill a gay person. Interesting thing is that these group had most members of all, reaching sometimes almost 20.ooo members, bringing together gay-bashers of all nationalities together – Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, anybody that understood b/h/s for that matter. Well, I use the term ‘gay-basher’ broadly because most of the children over there heard of the term ‘gay’ only yesterday and are probably not even sure what it means – it’s just some ‘knowledge’ they picked up from the society they live in – “it’s a disease and should be cured” is what most of them believe.
There are no similar hate groups in English, presumably because the facebook admins can react swiftly if they can understand what some group is all about without waiting for numerous people to hit the ‘report’ button and translate ‘Ubij [insert nationality here]’ for them. I know also some would like to blame facebook and other social media for making hate speech so available, but remember – it’s not guns that kill people.
I guess that facebook is still not considered to be so influential or important by mainstream media, at least not in the Balkans. All this despite the fact that both Serbia and Croatia have around 170.ooo members on facebook each, a respectable number which is only going to grow in the future, with Bosnia lagging behind with about 50.000 members. Despite the fact that it’s mostly teenagers. Despite the fact that members post things under their full names with their photos attached – without having any fear or feeling no responsibility that the things they are posting could be dangerous and are wrong.
After all, after observing Serbian media and society for some time now, should I be surprised things like this happen?
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