The Mathematics of Hate

For the past six weeks, Sierra Leone has been gripped in a bitter election campaign in which a plethora of parties have been vying for a place in the sun. Nothing remarkable about that. After all, elections are the hallmark of democracy. However, a few election cycles ago, one might have been more hopeful about the proceedings and the apparent diversity of punters. Surely, that’s good, with all the hopefuls, telling us how they intended to make life better for us. But even then, there was something of an edge to the rhetoric that was saying obliquely “vote for me, or else”. As it turned out, the outcome was peaceful, and we were all able to settle back, once again, into the same-old, same-old state of bad governance. The constitutional order was preserved, and the atmosphere of dodgy law and order maintained.

         Now to the present. Today, each one of us has been transformed into a messaging machine over which we ourselves have little personal control. It is a system that not only receives messages, but one that can also broadcast back, frequently at a higher decibel, to a wider circle of what the puppet-masters call “friends”. Messaging has now become similar to chain reactions, governed by the processes that mathematicians call “force amplification”, through the re-messaging system for as many times as there are recipients, whether by Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Tinder, Instagram, YouTube or whatever. And so, without realising it, we are played for the suckers that we are by corporate interests that have only one objective: increasing the bottom line. Their modus operandi is to encourage and even force us to “Like” and “Share” whatever message lands on our device. Every time we “like” and “share” we expand the reach of those money-making corporations. At the same time, we, the consumers, buy more and more stuff. A win-win for the corporate interests. Fair enough. There is nothing wrong with making the kind of money they make, despite the huge gap between them and the rest of us. It is a gap that cannot be ignored however, because, we the 99%, are put at an even greater disadvantage as we lay bare our innermost selves by our choices in “likes” and “shares”: It is as if we stand naked at the market square shouting, “come and get me”. And get us they do. They exploit our weaknesses by routing to us more of the kind of stuff that we “like” to “share”, including toxic messages that we, again, forcefully amplify in the manner mentioned earlier. To be victimized in this way we need not be literate or even minimally lettered. Information can be in written or spoken words, pictographs, cartoons or videos. All that is required of us is to look down and/or listen and then hit the share symbol and the message, benign or toxic, hate speech or fake news, wings its way to the next recipient in an ever-widening circle.

So, here we are, two weeks after the Sierra Leone general election, inching towards the uncertainties of a face-off between the two main presidential candidates. Each side claims actual or potential election malpractice by the other side, one of the North and the other of the South. It is a geographical divide that provides respectable cover for the underlying dystopian fissure in the society, namely our inability to think outside the box of tribe, the sin that is not usually named in polite company, but which lies at the bottom of all that ails us.

But of policies? Not a squeak. The social media are far too busy stirring the tribe pot to concern itself about the basic issues of governance that will turn the country from backward to “developing”.

And this is just the surface. We have no idea what else might be going on in the social media empires when they allow our data to be made accessible to those who would directly influence us to vote in a particular way. It was not much of a surprise, to me at least, that the likes of Cambridge Analytica had been involved in the voting processes that delivered Brexit and the White House to Donald Trump. But what has been shocking is that CA’s Canadian partner, Aggregate IQ, received money to influence the last Nigeria presidential election.  

How many miles between Nigeria and Sierra Leone?

Tell Fren Tru

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