Social Networks: Constructive or Callous?

Is the Internet helping to disgrace scoundrels, expose scandals, and bring down dictators? Or is it a place of fake intimacy in which innocent people get cyber-mobbed, shamed, and attacked? Probably both. Facebook, Twitter or YouTube are two-faced technologies: fighting cruelty, causing cruelty. Which face will prevail?

There is an Ethiopian proverb that goes, "When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion." We hear a lot these days about the Web as a communication weapon that helps ordinary people bring down lions like ousted Egyptian president Mubarak or Libya's dictator Gaddafi. 

In recent blog posts I wrote about how Google and Twitter helped the opposition movements in North Africa and the Middle East to organize, and I quoted Wael Ghonim that "If there was no social networks, it would have never been sparked."

Digital groups can also help bring down small-town criminals. As The New York Times reported, a cat hater in England was recently exposed on YouTube and Facebook after she left a kitten in a trashcan. Once she was found out, her official punishment was a $400 fine. But the unofficial punishment was meted out online and much harsher: public ridicule and death threats.

A few years ago in China, a high-heeled woman was captured on video stomping a small cat to death. The video went viral and drove countless indignant "Netizens" into an impassioned search for the evildoer. 

The woman lived in relative obscurity among 1.3 billion Chinese people, but within six days the Web militia found her: Her name was Wang Jiao of Luobei in Heilongjiag Province. The result: She was fired from her government job and driven out of her town.

"We have always wanted to shame people who did bad things," said the author Malcolm Gladwell. "Now it's cheap to do it. It's easy to break down the barriers."

Brett Ligon, the district attorney of Montgomery, Texas, regularly posts the names of drunken drivers on Twitter. "There is an embarrassment factor, the scarlet letter of law enforcement," Mr. Ligon told The New York Times.

But given their anonymity, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter can also lead to base behaviors.

Some people, from the comfort of their keyboards, went to new levels of malice when CBS senior correspondent Lara Logan was surrounded by 200 people and sexually assaulted on Cairo's Tahrir Square (see video).

After Logan was detained by Egyptian police, one digital sniper on the conservative blog Mofo Politics wrote: "OMG if I were her captors and there were no sanctions for doing so, I would totally rape her."

"She got what she deserved," one Yahoo comment went. "This is what happens when dumb sexy female reporters want to make it about them."

The anonymous nature of the Web can bring about a callousness that computer scientist Jaron Lanier has called a "culture of sadism."

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, says that technology is amoral, giving rise to instincts both good and bad. The real danger might be the weakening of compassion.

"If you dampen empathy and you encourage the immediate expression of whatever is in your mind, you get a lot of nastiness that wouldn't have occurred before."

What do you think? On the whole, do the good influences of social networks outweigh the bad? Will the technology produce net costs or net benefits? I look forward to reading you on my blog (http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/).

All the best,

P.S. To download my latest book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP) for free, go to Leading-Leaders.