Echo Chambers Analysis

The Echo of the Digital Divide

Before we may determine if online hate material may be regulated, we have to consider if the Internet can be sufficiently monitored in limiting the dissemination of hate speech. Despite attempts to embargo harassing transmissions in the form of filters, IPN bans, and reporting for content removal, the incongruities between international laws restrict the limitations invoked on actionable material. Web sites may proclude ‘fault lines’ by requiring the user, as a homogenising practice, to sign up for exclusive site content. In turn, account confirmation acts as a passport barring direct entry (via membership) for those who do not subscribe to the site’s particular (racial) practices. The requirement of login access …show more content…
Hatemongering havens which reinforce a ‘safe space’ for racists to develop and maintain interaction. These echo chambers can be impervious. Not only in their insulary, monolithic discourse, but also to certain legalities construing the distinction between advocacy for freedom of speech and from actionable material promoting/inciting criminal violence. Yet we have witnessed an ‘effervescence’ of echo chambers. Where the froth of rabid discourse ‘slips’ into the offline world in the form of an individual acting out his/her radical intent. Very rarely, if ever, do users go on to the Internet looking outside his/her comfort ‘zones’. Offline discourse, although, ‘lags’ behind online social mediums which intercede offline identities with online personalities. In theory, the synchronicity of offline social formations, (civil liberties, freedom of speech) chronologers of social conduct and historical rule, are quantified and then decompound through the various forms of online interaction: an offline belief is reduced to its essentials by code then proliferates into distinct, but constitutable, functional parts (ie. critical race theory v. #blacklivesmatter). Moreover, the dynamism of online interactions may familiarize/defamiliarize a user’s identity by calling into play their …show more content…
Their speech is cacophonous, meaning there is a certain dissonance on how to proceed. In the offline world, targets are as ‘visible’ and easy to focus a concentrated effort on, as with the online universe. Online pogroms, exactly, are anachronistic in that they are driven by the incoherency. A mindset of not knowing of whom to target precisely, unless that particular person invades their specific space. The public streets of the Internet bare the light of modernity to which the dark corners of the web remain content to burning effigies. Thus the racists may crawl out from their primordial huts into the city (taking on social media as their own, ala, Twitter). Albeit their actions are primitive, as their (vitriol) language, and can only suffice to vandalising the meeting place of a grander force: the vocal chorus of equality purging racialisation as a process in which future generations may intercept. Mainly, there are no sound arguments for racial inequality, yet plenty arguing for human equality. The online pogroms do not succeed in dispersing a community, or outcasting the witch from the village, but remain in superstition, of the ghosts in the shell that reside within the