Sunday, June 07, 2020

Twitter & Facebook's Special Mission to Manage the US Protests

Twitter & Facebook's Special Mission to Manage the US Protests
"Prioritization and Orientation," along with "Reducing Demands and Normalizing Challenges," is a special mission that is usually undertaken by social networks established by the United States Powers in events such as the recent anti-racism protests.

NOURNEWS - Anti-racist protests against the brutal murder of a black man in Minneapolis, which has spread to many parts of the United States, have taken on new dimensions and have even led to popular protests outside the United States.
The protest, which the media has acknowledged as unprecedented in the past 75 years, has clearly targeted "systematic racism" in the United States, which has long been institutionalized in the words of former US President Barack Obama.
Meanwhile, various sections of the media in the United States, while addressing this issue, tried to show their participation in these protests.
This was especially the case on social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, and even blackened the network's logo to show sympathy.
In support of the protests, Twitter changed its logo to black and pasted the hashtag BlackLivesMatter in the biography section of its official account.
Hundreds of Facebook employees also stopped protesting last Monday and joined the strike.
The staff added an automatic message to their emails stating that they were out of work in order to oppose Facebook's position on Trump's posts.
Twitter's response to Trump's messages was, of course, clearer and more difficult than Facebook's. Twitter for the first time hid one of the US president's tweets under a warning message to users, which provoked a reaction from Trump.
Twitter's public relations account also reacted separately to the tweet, saying that Trump's tweet was hidden because of his connection to violence and the possibility that it might inspire similar actions.
Note that; Although these events on social media seem to indicate an independent space away from these networks, but given the tactics of "news tyranny" in these networks and their history and performance can be seen behind the scenes of this association with the people, there are goals that could have a significant impact on the broad protests in the United States.
Using the "change of expectation" technique, which means first associating with the audience's approach and then changing their main attitude and guiding their minds toward the desired priorities, is a complex approach that Facebook and Twitter are pursuing as part of public anti-racism protests in the United States.
The statement then draws more attention to the fact that, according to the World Wide Web, Trump and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a phone call last week.
The method of news management in these social media, considering their background in similar situations, can be examined in at least two aspects:
First; "Prioritization and Orientation" In such a way that the mentioned social networks can change the priority of the protesters and change their direction due to their high coverage and influence by directing to the published news and highlighting a certain part of it.
Second; "Reducing demands and normalizing challenges," by reducing the level of protest from its macro nature to a few elements, and large demands shifting by focusing on issues such as the conviction of a police officer, so that the essence of the problem is gradually forgotten.
To describe precisely; The special mission of social media in such cases is to seize the wave of protests and remove the arrow from the political structure and government. However, these networks in countries targeted by the domination system, such as what happened in the color revolutions or events in Iran, that have exactly the opposite mission.
Based on the behind-the-scenes structural connections between the US government and companies such as Facebook and Twitter, it can be expected that in the short term, these networks will change the course of the protests behind the mask of public benevolence and efforts to eliminate discrimination.

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