BERLIN, GERMANY - AUGUST 20: Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks at a press conference ... [+]
LinkedIn is usually a fairly safe and peaceful place, full of whip-smart business pundits and people who post helpful videos about engaging with an audience. I’ve been an avid user since the inception and tend to browse the feeds on a daily basis.
Of all the social networks, I usually like to hang out and comment on posts or chat with people on LinkedIn because, in general, they seem fairly rational.
A recent TED Conferences post has made me question that a little.
The post involves a TED Talk from 2018 featuring Greta Thunberg talking about climate change. That video has racked up over five million views and counting so far. Sadly, while the Nobel Prize nominee didn’t win this last week (that honor went to the World Food Program), she has stayed in the spotlight since her famous “How Dare You!” speech at the U.N. and is very active on Twitter.
In the talk, Thunberg explains how she struggled with mental illness and mentions her on-going school strike. (It predates the U.N. appearance by only a month.) “The climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is to wake up and change,” she says in the talk.
In a hat tip to Thunberg and the Nobel Prize, TED posted a link to the video. There’s a tagline about needing action not hope to fight climate change.
Everything seems fairly straightforward. Another day, another reminder about the ills of the world and what we can do to stop them. Reading through the comments makes you wonder if mankind is in the stinker, however.
“Absolute morons” reads one. “Brainwashed” reads another.
Many of the posts call Thunberg out because she has “handlers” and for being overly scripted. (That’s a little odd considering every TED Talk is highly scripted.) Several go much further than that, criticizing her age, her gender, and much more.
A few users tried to push back in the comments section. One included a quote from the poet Maya Angelou: “If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.”
Then someone else chimed in: “This girl needs help.”
It gets worse from there. (As of this writing, a few of the most harsh comments have disappeared. I’m not sure how I feel about that, actually. I wonder if LinkedIn itself is deleting comments or if it’s TED Conferences. I reached out to a conference media contact and will include an update here if they respond.)
We’re living in an interesting time. Trolls are taking over the mindshare on social media, posting far more often than the more reasonable users. Reasonableness is no longer the norm, although I do support the right to make comments.
One of my favorite quotes about this topic is from the filmmaker J.J. Abrams, who said: “We live in a moment where everything seems to immediately default to outrage, and there’s an M.O. of it’s either exactly as I see it or you’re my enemy… But it’s a crazy thing that there is such a norm that seems to be devoid of nuance and compassion.”
What he’s saying is: Social media created a forum where we can split hairs with each other over all of the nuances of life and we do that all day long. We can post critical comments about a climate change activist...so we do. As I mentioned in this piece about the movie The Social Dilemma, the experts say this tool we use for public conversation is actually alive. It learns and adapts. It customizes. It evolves.
My quick addition to that claim is: The tool is also hungry and tends to thrive on chaos and disorder, on negative thoughts and troll-like behavior. One study found that false information travels six times faster on Twitter than something that’s true.
It’s easy to connect the dots that those fake news stories are mostly negative, and we gravitate to those. It takes more work to hold back a comment and to click the pause button. Being negative is easy. Withholding a comment about someone giving a climate change talk you don’t like takes effort.
I used to think LinkedIn was a bastion of intelligent discourse. After this LinkedIn post, I wondered if it will descend into the usual muck and mire eventually.
