Brandon Szuminsky, Ph.D., who teaches in BW’s Department of Communication Arts & Sciences Baldwin Wallace University, offers interesting insights into the role fringe social media sites play in creating communities of radical outliers like the Pittsburgh shooter and the Florida pipe bomber. He is available to talk about “how these online communities connect otherwise disparate people into self-reinforcing circles that amplify each other—with disastrous results.”
Dr. Szuminsky adds:
“There’s plenty of discussion on the political side and the community side of this week’s events, but in a lot of ways there’s a clear throughline of this being a media technology story as well. We’ve always had extreme outliers, but changes in technology and lower barriers to entry in the last two decades have made it possible for these fringe elements to find each other and fester. Many people are aware of or have experienced the ‘above-ground’ content from extremists (neo-nazis on Twitter, for example, or racially charged Facebook groups) but then there’s also so much that flies under the radar, like Gab.com, which was the site of choice for the Pittsburgh shooter. These sites help connect fringe viewpoints and provide self-reinforcing echo chambers that would not have been possible without these types of social platforms.”
Over the weekend, he was quote on this topic in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
Sites like Gab fly under the radar … because frankly they’re these isolated islands that don’t connect to the reality-based internet,” said Brandon Szuminsky, an assistant professor at Baldwin Wallace University who teaches media literacy and has published research on misinformation and social media.
Technology has fragmented the media landscape so that it’s virtually impossible to get the kind of broad audience that news outlets coveted in times past, he said. Social media’s business model relies not on breadth, but on intensity of engagement.
“Even if the site owners don’t want to perpetuate hate like Gab did, they're willing to look the other way to make money,” he said.
Please let us know if you’re interested in adding Brandon’s expertise to your news coverage.
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