Cecil the Lion and The Facebook Outrage Machine

[gwendally]

I recently heard that 40% of people only get their news from Facebook feeds.  (I'm not quickly finding the cite/site for this, but here's Pew Research from 2013 saying a similar thing: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/10/16/12-trends- ( Read more... )

Comments

[anonymous]

I'm less concerned by the death of an apparently iconic lion I've never heard of as I am by all of the nonsense people pass along and get worked up about without checking to see if it's true. The Onion is a satire site and a damned good one, but where did all these other fake news sites come from? They're not funny, they're not smart, it's almost as though someone is deliberately trying to taint the well.

[crazyburro]

just watch fox or msnbc and you might wonder about the inability of people to figure out what's true, half true, or false.

[anonymous]

There just doesn't seem to be a decent way of saying "hey, check Snopes" without it being a condescending and rude thing to do, yet you don't want your friends and loved ones to find themselves in the embarrassing position of spreading falsehoods, right? WeekendPBS was talking about this recently.

In this Cecil situation it isn't an outright falsehood that he killed the lion: he absolutely did and it's really distasteful. But. Without big game hunting you don't get vast game preserves and you lose the ability to conserve vast tracts of land. Kill a lion once in a while and the rest get to live. Never allow hunting and just see how fast those nations turn that habitat into cattle ranching. It's a hugely complex topic and saying "it's awful to kill" feels good on Facebook, but you may be accidentally saying "so let's have hundreds of poor people lose their jobs and turn the wildlife habitat into cattle ranches instead." Uggh. Hard to turn that into a righteously indignant narrative, eh?

[trendywendy]

I'm so glad at least a handful of people that I really like interacting with still post on LJ since I dumped FB a few years ago. This is a much more civil and informed medium.

[touchofgr3y]

This was very interesting to read - thank you for sharing.

40% of people getting their news via Facebook - that's a very, very scary number.

[docstrange]

Yes. Almost every feel-good aid/conservation effort finds itself stymied by complexity. Fortunately, many of the organizations that DO that sort of work understand the complexity and are not one-axis ideologically driven.

Some people I know are stunned that the Forest Society in NH (Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests) is very supportive of (legal) hunting and logging. Complexity escapes the act-only-on-feelings mind. And the Africa land preserves' situation is even more socially (and ecologically) complex.