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BOOK REVIEW: Our role in the online horror story — and what to do about it

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Richard Seymour catalogues our toxic relationship with grim yet compelling social media in an unflinching look

Incidents of abuse on social media are disturbingly frequent. Picture: 123RF/RUDALL30

This lure to compulsion is no accident. Sean Parker, inventor of music-sharing site Napster, early investor in Facebook, and now a self-described “conscientious objector”, has described the likes, favourites and retweets as exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology Trolls didn’t come from nowhere, after all. People have always been able to dissociate from the hurt they inflict. As Seymour notes, Donald Rumsfeld shrugged off the devastation in Iraq with almost “sociopathic cheer”. “Stuff happens,” the former secretary of defence once said. In the pre-social media era, journalists shamed citizens and reality TV ridiculed the vulnerable.

 

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