I can hardly remember a time when the first thing I did upon waking up was take coffee on my terrace while enjoying the greenery and contemplating on the day ahead. These days it’s coffee with the computer checking out Facebook, my poor plants left to their own devices.
Social media has changed the way I live my life — and not necessarily for the better. I appreciate the ability to get back in touch with long lost friends and exchange opinions on events of the day, but scrolling through the news feed is often an emotional roller coaster.
Graphic photos and videos of carnage and cruelty to people and animals are impossible to escape, examples of racism or bigotry get my blood pressure soaring, the farcical state of British politics has me mourning for the country of my birth and I’m overwhelmingly frustrated at the plight of Syrian refugees buried under the media radar. I’m often tempted to quit but don’t — fearful of missing out on something important and how hard would it be to say adieu to hundreds of friends who’ve enriched me in so many ways.
That said I’m endlessly shocked at the stories of women I know personally, whose lives have been detrimentally impacted by hooking up with unsavoury characters on social media dubbed by the British press “love rats”. Losers troll sites looking for vulnerable, usually older, females who fall for their protestations of all-encompassing love.
I’ve met three American women this year alone, who’ve sold-up and travelled across the world to be with a greedy lothario they’ve only spoken with on Skype, only to be abandoned heartbroken, penniless and feeling used by scammers with an eye on an American passport and/or cash.
Christine (not her real name) from California hooked-up with an unemployed young Egyptian on the net. They married in Alexandria. He was adoring and attentive until she was unable to fulfil her promise to sell her house so that he would have funds to start a business. His ‘princess’ became a liability. She was beaten, threatened and locked-up in a sparsely-furnished flat until her son persuaded the American embassy to launch an intervention.
Another, in her 40s and divorced, who once had a thriving business in her home state, soon discovered that the love of her life was a down-and-out heroin addict but not before she was persuaded to hand him a power of attorney over her affairs. You can guess the rest.
There are female scammers who prey on married men; they lure them into compromising situations which they record before blackmailing their victims to pay up to prevent their lapse reaching the ears of family members.
Far worse than the scammers in cyberspace are the terrorist recruiters, successfully using social media to disseminate their sick ideology and suck-in gullible young men and women into their web. Suddenly, those with malicious intent have a forum and the kind of interconnectedness Osama Bin Laden and his ilk could only dream of. This is the sinister side to social media aided by encryption enabling radicals to foment plots undetected by governments until it’s too late.
Equally despicable human beings, paedophiles, no longer have to rely on hanging around school playgrounds dispensing sweets. They have also become adept at exploiting social media to groom children or prey on teenagers using fake photographs and names. Youtube favourite, 21-year-old Coby Persin, is one of many who’ve carried out social experiments to discover the ease with which paedophiles operate. He opened a new Facebook account pretending to be a 15-year-old and within days he had secured real life ‘dates’ with three girls aged between 12 and 14.
Even more concerning for governments is the way social media has facilitated mass mobilisation. We will never know for certain just how big a role social media played in kick starting the so-called Arab Spring and other populist uprisings.
Ordinary people have been empowered by sheer force of numbers and are currently rising up against the establishment in both the US and Britain whose political landscapes are undergoing major transformations.
The Trump phenomenon is one example; the impotence of elites, politicians and economists to sway the British public away from a Brexit another. Populism is the name of today’s political game. People’s fears and concerns are reinforced by the likeminded until they reach a critical mass upon which ambitious politicians feed.
Facebook’s father Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, said to be the brains behind Twitter, have almost singlehandedly changed the way our world functions. They’ve unwittingly opened the lid on Pandora’s Box with unimaginable consequences. Would we have had it any other way? Probably not! But that doesn’t mean to say that embattled governments won’t choose to fight back citing security concerns. If the powers that be reach the conclusion that social media threatens the global order, it’ll be gone.
Linda S. Heard is an award-winning British political columnist and guest television commentator with a focus on the Middle East.
