Trayvon Martin and Civil Unrest in the Age of Social Media

April 10th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

Is social media giving the public more effective ways to channel their energy and enlighten their opinions? On a recent installment of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Maher asked New York Times Visual Op-Ed columnist Charles Blow if he believes the shooting of Trayvon Martin will end in civil unrest similar to the South-Central Riots of 1992 following the Rodney King verdict. Blow’s response focused on the powerful effect of social media to disarm, educate and coordinate the public.

“I don’t believe it ends in riots,” Blow said. “I think that the world has moved to a different place. That we are now able to spend our energy through social media and organize in a way that defuses what used to be spontaneous and into the streets… You still go into the streets but now you go with a mission, you go with a common cause that is a little more sophisticated than it was pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook.”

Mario Almonte, a PR specialist and blogger for The Huffington Post contends that Blow’s comments neglect to acknowledge the lineage of successful peaceful protests that pre-date social media.

“[Blow’s] statement seems to imply that before social media, people who took to the street did so in a chaotic fashion,” Almonte said. “Yet, what would you say about the famous Martin Luther King march on Washington and the civil rights movement? What would you say about all the other historic social movements like Suffragette, labor unions and the Vietnam War protests of the ’60s? In all these instances, people had a very distinct and very focused purpose for their demonstrations. They didn’t need Twitter to help spread the message.”

Almonte believes that if earlier organized protests and events had social media available, it might have worked against the cause, further diluting the message.

“If Twitter had been around during the American Revolution, Paul Revere would probably have used hashtags to tell his countrymen about the British, but his signal from the lighthouse and his ride through town proved just as effective, and much, much more dramatic and inspirational,” Almonte said.

Artist and award-winning environmental designer Pablo Solomon, who was involved in civil rights and the environmental movement, sees the initial reaction of an event when fed through social media as forming a myriad of instant opinion, conjecture and context, the value of which is often a gray area.

“Because of the instant mass communication that is possible the original facts, importance et cetera connected with any event can quickly be distorted and the emotions exploited,” Solomon said.

This, according to Solomon, has been especially true with the Martin shooting.

“Before the facts of the case were gathered and analyzed in a rational manner, there were numerous, if not countless, groups, individuals, politicians, propagandists, race agitators, racists, et cetera using the emotions of this tragic and heart-breaking incident to stir up trouble, to raise money, to inflame passions or to meet political agenda,” Solomon said.

A positive comes out of social media, though, and serves the general public by affording the education and reciprocation of ideas outside the direct stream of a group or individuals personal gain.

“Thank god for the Internet and other social media which, allows the free exchange of ideas when those political agendas have almost complete control over traditional media outlets,” Solomon said.