{"id":101043,"date":"2017-03-17T10:57:45","date_gmt":"2017-03-17T10:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/?p=101043"},"modified":"2017-03-17T10:57:45","modified_gmt":"2017-03-17T10:57:45","slug":"has-social-media-lost-the-power-of-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/blog\/has-social-media-lost-the-power-of-debate\/","title":{"rendered":"Has social media lost the power of debate?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-size: 18px;\"><strong>Barely a week goes by without another journalist, celebrity or <\/strong><strong>other public figure<\/strong><strong> reportedly quitting social media due to the high levels of abuse on the channel. This week it\u2019s the turn of Owen Jones, Guardian columnist and author of the book <em>Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class<\/em>, <\/strong><strong>quitting<\/strong><strong> social <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pressgazette.co.uk\/guardian-columnist-owen-jones-quits-twitter-and-facebook-because-he-finds-left-wing-abuse-utterly-depressing\/\" target=\"_blank\"><u>citing the scene as<\/u><\/a>\u00a0\u201ccompletely and utterly depressing.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Jones, who has more than 250,000 \u201clikes\u201d on Facebook and 500,000 followers on Twitter, regularly receives abuse for his political opinion and debate from both sides of the political spectrum.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking to journalists, Jones said: \u201cOn a daily basis I have angry strangers yelling at me, on the one hand, that I\u2019m responsible for the destruction of the Labour Party, and on the other, I\u2019m a right-wing sell-out careerist who\u2019s allied to Tony Blair and possibly in the pay of the Israeli government (and that I\u2019m a Blairite c*** who needs to go f*** myself, and so on and so forth).\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI find myself constantly engaging with people denouncing my motives while sending abuse. And my friends ask: What are you doing? Why are you wasting your life on this nonsense? And they\u2019re just right.<\/p>\n<p>Jones continued: \u201cAdded with the usual far-right extremists sending ever more creative descriptions of how they\u2019re going to torture and murder me, I\u2019m no longer convinced social media is as useful a tool for political debate and discussion as it once was.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>By quitting social media, Jones is highlighting a very important issue for many social networks.<\/p>\n<p>With so much abuse, many social networks are far from being engaging social environments they set out to be.<\/p>\n<p>If you compare online social networks with real social environments, it\u2019s easy to see why it\u2019s is so important that certain social standards are adhered to. For example:<\/p>\n<p>While you might enjoy a good debate about numerous topics (sport, politics, religion, dating, etc.) when you are down the pub with your mates, the moment the crowd turns nasty and threats of violence are issued the hope for positive engagement is over. Before long, the pub garners a certain reputation and \u201cdecent\u201d people stop going.<\/p>\n<p>The same is true for social media. It only takes a handful of \u201ctrolls\u201d to turn people off.<\/p>\n<p>What can social media sites do to ensure social media stays social while championing conversation and debate and making sure everyone feels safe? Share your comments below:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Barely a week goes by without another journalist, celebrity or other public figure reportedly quitting social media due to the high levels of abuse on the channel. This week it\u2019s the turn of Owen Jones, Guardian columnist and author of the book Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, quitting social citing the scene as \u201ccompletely and utterly depressing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":423,"featured_media":101044,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3729],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101043"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/423"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101043"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101102,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101043\/revisions\/101102"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}