There continue to be moments when we realize just how far we still have to go in America, and just what little ways we’ve actually come…
- In August, the Wall Street Journal reported that the first five months of the Covid-19 pandemic saw a 600% increase in membership in the ten largest QAnon Facebook groups.
- According to a Reuters poll, 13% of the US population supported the siege at the capitol.
- As of September 2020, nearly 60% of Republicans reportedly believed in QAnon, including newly elected members of Congress.
The above statistics were pulled from an article, “QAnon and Mass Digital Radicalisation: Peacebuilding and the American Insurgency”, written by Dr. Lisa Schirch, who joins us to unpack the context of these alarming statistics as we explore the impact of social media on amplifying issues of systemic racism and white supremacist ideology which has shaped the culture of the United States. Lisa discusses how easily hate speech and conspiracies spread on social media and highlights the need for a new fairness doctrine, the importance of media literacy education for the public, and regulation of social media companies to reduce the impact of misinformation.
Lisa is currently a Senior Research Fellow for the Toda Peace Institute, where she directs the Social Media, Technology and Peacebuilding program.
Lisa: I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, which is a city that I moved to when I was 12 from Ohio and what I learned in public school in Richmond, Virginia is that the civil war is not over for many people. And I lived in a mostly white community and an African-American family moved in across the street from us and the hostility of our white neighbors to that family was so intense. All the other white kids started walking to a different bus stop and I was there with the African-American child who was my new neighbor and, you know, I had been taught racial justice, civil rights movement growing up in Ohio and I couldn't believe what I was seeing, I think and I didn't really realize how divided this country was and how much the civil war continued to live on. You know, that was back in the early 1980s when I was… when that was happening in Richmond, as in my childhood. And I think it shaped how I saw the world, that there were sort of historical injustices that had been suppressed and that people were divided and in conflict in my own country. As I went through college, I ended up living in Chicago, downtown urban Chicago, where I was often the only white person on the metro or the subway, the elves, say what they call in Chicago. And, you know, I became race conscious, I became really aware of the very different experiences that people with different skin colors have in this country. And out of that, you know, I wanted to devote my life to trying to figure out what do you do with historical legacies like we have in the US, and it took me to working in many other countries actually. I worked in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan, Jordan, all over the Middle East as well as East and West Africa. And a lot of my international work in peacebuilding, which is… I ended up majoring this in college, peace studies and then doing a PhD in conflict analysis and resolution, trying to figure out how do you heal societies, how do you transform and become a more just and peaceful place for people to live of all skin colors or all religions. And, you know, that question, it's a question that I still ask today, how do we do this?
Join us for season 2 as we explore extremism, the Alt-Right, hate crimes, and the blurred lines of religion underneath it all.
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