Going viral on social media

A couple of months ago the video of an incident with someone named “Keegan” and his friends fighting at a braai while someone recorded it went viral. Both social and mainstream media went crazy, and everyone shared and clicked on the video, which everyone thought was very funny.
 
In fact some woman posted a whole diatribe on Facebook about how this video was actually some comic relief from our very hard lives in South Africa. She said it was good to laugh at ourselves from time to time. Except, we weren’t laughing at ourselves, were we? We were laughing at a bunch of drunken men at a braai, two of whom were punching each other. Now I don’t know about you, but this has never happened at any braai that I have ever been to.
 
This was an act of violence. There were grown men fighting while people watched and one filmed. And what happens a month later? Children at a primary school copy the video, except they we’re not drunk, they were bullies emulating the video that was glamourised in the media. So do we laugh at this? Do we call this comic relief?
 
I think it’s shocking that we have a group of young people who find it humorous to bully other people for sport and for internet clicks. And it speaks directly to the depths of depravity to which social media has sunk. These were school children in uniform and with the school building in the background. So where were the teachers, security, and a parent when this was happening?
 
In another incident in Cape Town, two girls went at it on the school grounds while someone filmed the fight. This video then made its way on to social media. And the fact is: these videos first make it on to Facebook before it’s seen by any authority and it’s shared and re-shared ad nauseam. And someone is always filming instead of putting their cellphone into their pocket and saying, “Please do not beat up this person!”
 
As far as I’m concerned, we have all just become spectators in our own depravity and stupidity. It’s all we want to do. And not only do we want to watch it, we’ve also become the producers of; the directors of, and so the first thing is to make sure that you can film it and then post it. And I’ve asked myself in recent weeks: are these postings there to bring attention to the problem? Unlikely. It’s done to win some kind of momentary fame and internet clicks. People want to be able to brag, “A thousand people clicked on my link to my YouTube video!” or whatever the case may be.
 
The question is: what is the responsibility of the person filming these public incidents in terms of protecting the privacy of the individuals in the video? And what is their responsibility in reporting it to an authority that can actually do something about it.
 
The only time a right to privacy is trumped is if the public will be protected from imminent danger if they watch the material. There’s a difference between invading people’s privacy by way of a video and simply posting a status update letting people know you witnessed a fight or whatever.
 
So your status can read: “At my school today a girl got beaten up by a group of thugs!” And you don’t have to post a picture or a video. You’re not going to get as many “likes”, I can promise you that. But one needs to consider the moral prerogative before posting. If you’re going to make the case that the reason for sharing the content is in the public’s interest, which I don’t think it necessarily is, then you do not need to post a video, you could just as well post a text status update.
 
The thoughts on these viral videos are a very contentious. If you think of it, not only are you bearing witness to this kind of bullying and violence, you are now fuelling the matter by providing the platform for sharing; whether it’s for clicks or for fame or infamy.
 
And for me this is along the same lines as that culture that MTV’s Jackass created – where it was funny to see people fall and hurt themselves or to do stupid things and place themselves in imminent danger for a few chuckles. It’s the same mentality, except these videos we are seeing now contains actual, real violence. And we need to ask ourselves, “Am I simply an observer of what’s happening or am I creating a platform for the event, however violent it may be, because there is an audience that is salivating to see the next incident?”
 
And the fact that we as media are giving it this kind of platform are actually saying, “Yes, there’s a market out there. Let’s feed it!” And scouring media these days, I am finding the content is becoming more and more reliant on what people are viewing on Facebook and YouTube.
 
In fact I read an article the other day about how these kids developed this plug in for Chrome that distinguishes between real and fake news and verified and unverified news. They discovered for example that a large number of stories that were being posted about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were actually fake news stories. And mainstream media are unfortunately picking up on these fake stories and running with them.
 
The fact is it’s impossible to take away the market; the audience is never going to go away. But personally you can make a choice not to give it an audience. And I’m not advocating living in a blinkered world or a self-imposed bubble. You just need to make intelligent, conscious choices about what you share and re-share.
 
So back to the video that was meant to emulate the Keegan video – if it’s true that they were in fact beating up a child, and it looked like it was, and not just staging an event for the purposes of sharing it on social media, those children need to be disciplined. There needs to be repercussions. Whether you’re a child or an adult there needs to be recourse if violence is perpetrated against someone. And when it makes its way into social media videos we need to recognise that it becomes a spectator sport. And it becomes gratuitous. When people say “gratuitous violence” they need to understand what it means. It means it’s violence for violence sake; it’s for free – no responsibility, no consequence, just free violence.  
 
And we as media have a huge responsibility when it comes to these matters. We shouldn’t be sharing these videos, we should be reporting on them; and reporting on the sharing of them, if necessary. We shouldn’t be sharing it like any other person would to get views. That’s not responsible – and we’re just becoming part of the problem and we move away from being an objective reporter or observer of the newsworthy event; we then become a participant.