The social media: the fortunate unfortunate village square for hate propaganda

Abstract

This treatise is a qualitative research in philosophy and literary studies and it considers fake news (misinformation and disinformation) from the perspective of hate speech. It focuses on the social media as the contemporary day smart village square for all sorts of hate mongering. This is one of the ill-starred pitfalls of the bandwagon called “globalization”. The buzz word ‘globalization’ is a catchword that points to the prevailing moment in human history of civilization and development-the age of digital-micro-lization of the world space. The fulcrum of globalization is communicative technologies. The presence of advanced communicative technologies or facilities like the internet, satellite, android phones and other related smart gargets has made global communication now easy and swift; since these facilities have the capability to move information from one part of the globe to the other (within a slit-second). It is in this sense that the world is now called a global village. However, the paradox of this village square enabled by the social media networking is that it is relishing and at the same time palpably fraught. Positively, social media is accessible, interactive, immediate and relevant; negatively, one among the numerous causes for alarm is the rising misappropriation of social networking sites for hate speech. Employing analytic and hermeneutical methods, the philosophico-literary discourse critically interrogates the misappropriation of this artificial and synthetic neighborhood for the proliferation of all sorts of inciting, poisonous, destructive, divisive, manipulative and inflammable speeches. This study reveals that two fundamental factors are responsible for the thriving of hate speech in this techno-neighborhood, i. humans nowadays are gullible to the point of naïvely believing any information from the social media as true and correct; ii. lack of censorship and quality control of most social media. Consequently, the ultimate goal of the chapter is to seek for philosophically pragmatic remedy to this malady in order to advance the frontiers of this creative and emerging technology. Therefore, the researchers present a number of philosophico-literary theoretical frameworks and modalities to stern the tide of hate speech explosion in the social media.