Social media equally amplify moral support for harmful and humane causes

Evidence

Limited public access to the media has been a major obstacle to the exercise of public influence on detrimental social policies and practices. The advent of the Internet and other revolutionary advances in communication technologies have enabled people to bypass, at least to some extent, media gatekeepers. Online influence, especially through social media, has become the principal vehicle for the exercise of social influence. Social media are instantaneous and wide reaching, transcending time, place, and national borders. Adherents morally legitimize and gain support for their causes and discredit those of their opponents largely through social media. However, as a political forum, the Internet is a double-edged tool. Unfiltered and unfettered, it is equally effective for mobilizing moral and social support for harmful purposes as for humane ones. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2975

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the information-overload and communication-technology threads from Communication as Culture and The Bias of Communication, and resonates with the media-ecology claims in Deep Listening. — connects to: Online influencers become symbolic placeholders for audiences’ larger moral and political allegiances
• SEED: Angle: how gatekeeper-removal (social media) symmetrically empowers moral mobilization for both atrocity and resistance - the same infrastructure that ran the Rohingya campaign also ran the Arab Spring.