Why it’s important to pause for thought before launching a trial by social media

As a social media editor, watching the trajectory of ‘culture war stories’ is exhausting, especially when it comes to Jussie Smollett

When news broke on 29 January that Empire star Jussie Smollett had been brutally attacked in Chicago, it spread like wildfire on social media.

Attention wasn’t drawn just because the incident involved a popular TV star – it was also a racist, homophobic attack, with sinister elements involving a noose and talk of being “in Maga country”.

Immediately, Twitter’s dominant liberal wing drew the obvious conclusions: that the toxic environment of Trump’s America has fuelled this kind of behaviour, and the blame could be laid all the way from the deep south to the White House lawn.

Those same people are now left confused and taken aback by the revelation that – for whatever reason – Smollett appears to have faked the attack. Their trial by social media was premature, and while Smollett himself is ultimately to blame in this story, those who leapt to conclusions have had to reckon with the immediacy of their unquestioned belief.

They have fallen victim to confirmation bias – the rush to believe in something which appears to confirm your pre-existing beliefs or feelings – the fires of which social media loves to stoke.

In the era of Brexit and Trump, liberals are long used to pointing this behaviour out in conservatives, and protesting loudly about it. We’ve seen it in the birther conspiracy, in photographs of a Muslim woman at the scene of the Westminster Bridge attack, and even in the president of the United States retweeting miscaptioned far-right propaganda.

In the struggle to get the moral upper hand on such people, liberals have accidentally wound up playing the same game; so desperate to find fault with the right that they find themselves believing a story which – to all intents and purposes – appears to have been constructed as the perfect outrage bait.

I write about this incident because on both sides, this is occurring more and more, and as a social media editor, watching the trajectory of “culture war stories” is exhausting.

You know the type: someone is plucked from obscurity in the morning after a viral incident, hoisted high as a hero by lunchtime, only to be outed as problematic by the end of the day, earning a brutal slapdown from “the other side”.

If we keep feeding that monster, it will grow so big that it consumes all reasonable debate.

Most social media users leave no time to think twice, no time for nuance, and increasingly, no time to wait for the truth. Let’s all take a moment before we comment and spread stories, lest it make us all look like fools.

Yours,

Ben Kelly

Deputy social media editor