Democracy of social media

Over recent years social media has transformed our lives. We can plug into incredibly diverse causes broadcasting from every corner of the globe.
By The Newsroom
Published 9th Jul 2016, 10:00 BST
Updated 7th Jun 2018, 21:24 BST

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We can make an interactive contribution on any topic under the sun. The power of the Internet in general, and social media in particular, is immense.

As well as sites of world-wide interest there are also very local ones. One of these is a Facebook site with around 9,000 members which focuses on life in Bexhill.

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It was set up and is now administered by a small group of people who monitor and censor activity according to rules which seem to be made up on the hoof.

The philosophy underpinning the Internet in the western world is that it should be open and free and available to anyone.

That is a principle worth fighting for.

However, I do worry about sites such as the Bexhill-on-Sea Facebook Group (by no means unique in this respect) whose administrators regularly strike out posts and remove members they don’t agree with, simply because they don’t agree with them.

Such censorship is the very antithesis of the democracy which the Internet stands for.

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It seems odd that the Bexhill-on-Sea group’s administrators place a forum in the public domain, benefiting from the Internet’s values of freedom and democracy, and then go out of their way to deliberately avoid putting those very values into practice.

Peter Webb

Glenleigh Park Road

Bexhill

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Related topics:internetFacebookBexhillTwitter