Belfast Riots-Potential Further Context
I‘ve been listening to the first episode on Belfast from last week, and it’s made me think of something:
Somehow, at some point, I signed into Quora with my Google account to view a post or yell at someone who was being particularly stupid or some-fucking-thing, I genuinely have no idea; but ever since then I’ve been getting emails from them suggesting posts, and because I’m especially susceptible to clickbait, sometimes I open them.
A few months ago, I remember seeing this rash of horrible, racist troll comments about immigrants in the UK; people claiming to be Muslim and saying that they wanted to enact Sharia Law (I highly doubt whoever posted that even knows what that means), highlighting violent crimes supposedly committed by Scary Brown Immigrants, things of that nature. I know that Quora isn’t particularly big or influential, as far as social media websites go, but it is a place that people go to get information, and I feel like the kind of people who are going to be part of a racist riot are not necessarily going to be thinking critically about things that support their worldview. It just reminds me of that ethnic cleansing in India that got started on WhatsApp, or the Facebook-linked genocide in Myanmar. Very scary to see and it feels like it might be important, at least in the interest of documentation.