If you read my column this week (on the page next to this one), then you’ll read a pretty fascinating tale about racial tension online. For some reason, the Internet seems to be a hotbed for people to say controversial things without much reason for actually saying them.
Continuing with the example of my column, I wrote a piece about how many on Twitter were calling foul on the new Star Wars trailer as they claimed – rather baselessly – that the movie is anti-white.
Now I won’t get into the specifics of what I think on that matter here, you can read my column for more specific insights on why those people are specifically wrong. Instead, I’d like to use this particular opportunity to talk about these knuckleheads in general.
Consider for a moment the amount of people that these people make upset. We can even drift away from this specific example and look at others. Look at the people who do things like spam the Facebook pages of the deceased, say radically incendiary things about politicians and public figures whenever afforded the opportunity on message boards, or just generally occupy every hate-space in the bowls of the web, waiting for the opportunity to flash their claws.
These trolls are a dime a dozen. I’d imagine most people have seen them somewhere in their time online. It’s strange, though. As much as I’d like for these people to just up and go away, I would never want to take away their abilities to say these kinds of things.
Now, I’m not talking about the people who decide to make death-threats and chronically cyber bully people into psychological and physical pain. Those people are the scum of the Earth and should be flagged and reported at every turn.
No, I’m talking about a more benign evil. The people whose beliefs are plain old wrong. The people who from a purely objective standpoint are filled with nothing but meaningless cruelty and uninformed rage.
Why should their ability to say whatever they want not be taken away? Because how will we know the fools when we can’t see them? The internet has given us unlimited possibilities to create messages and dispense ideas in a variety of ways. It’s the Wild West.
That means – like in a typical western – there are a lot of cowboys out there just firing blindly because they can fire. Let them. Let them do it because they are the same people who can also be torn down.
I’d rather live in a place where these people aren’t censored. I want to know the fools as they come.The people who think that their opinion is gospel simply because they get to sit behind a keyboard and put it online.
Good. Let them. It just makes it easier for us well-adjusted people to steer clear away from the looney tunes who think that the world is out to get them simply because their viewpoint is narrow.
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