For decades to come, regardless of the outcome, the crazy election of 2016 will be studied by political scientists. But there are immediate lessons for all of us.
One of the election’s drivers was an over-reliance of the electorate to be informed by social media. It is well established that social media information is plagued by shaky accuracy and zero accountability standards.
Despite that, many still use it as their primary news source. Society separates into social media silos of like-minded people seeking instant sources and judging as legitimate only narratives that reinforce our confirmation bias.
The biggest emergent social media weapon has been the #Hashtags used by BOTH sides.
Trump has not been charged with sexual abuse but he’s been labeled a #Predator. Secretary Clinton has not been charged with an e-mail related crime but the hashtag #LockHerUp took off.
Our political view determines which hashtag we pick to prove someone’s guilt. #PresumptionOfInnocence is so #OldSchool.
An impartial observation of Trump shows he is a believer in social media, adept at crafting easily digestible and easily shared 140 character Tweets. In this election he mastered, and perhaps pioneered, the ability to speak political #Hashtag. It’s a shortcut to group your tweets with others, a political GPS helping followers locate the virtual flash mob that morphs into a trending topic community.
What Trump either planned or stumbled upon was creating easy to remember #Hashtags for his supporters to define his opponents in negative terms. The #Hashtags went viral.
The 2016 election lesson: Politicians who in the past fought to avoid being labeled must now avoid getting hashtagged.
Trump opponents got hashtagged #LyinTed #LittleMarco and #CrookedHillary. However, they cut both ways as trending hashtags stuck to him: #NeverTrump. Some came from his own words in debates: #NastyWoman and #BadHombres. Others came from a recorded conversation on a bus.
If Trump loses it may be a case of “If you live by the #Hashtag, you die by the #Hashtag.”
But that may also be a lesson for our country.
The hashtag is a dumbed-down lens to view people, particularly those we don’t like. Here, our community has lived through five years of condemnation by uninformed trolls wielding hashtags.
When confronted by evidence about certain issues, people simply cling to their security blanket false narratives with a simplified inaccurate hashtag. It is easier to lob a hashtag back, no matter how ill-informed, than to admit you were wrong.
Hashtags undermine our basis in the #PresumptionOfInnocence replacing it with the #PresumptionOfGuilt.
There is certainly historical precedent for this in our history. Think about it this way; #Witch in 17th Century Salem and #Commie during the Red Scare would have been trending topics. In both eras of panic the accused had to disprove their guilt.
Hashtags enable us to express our worst impulses. When judging people we dislike we readily believe and accept the worst stories about political foes, people in the news or pop culture no matter how outrageous or shaky the source. #PresumptionOfGuilt
The danger for our future is the use of divisive hashtags, feeding fear and resentment of people who don’t look like us, don’t pray like us or who have different political views. Hashtags are an easy path to assign guilt while hardening views and divisions.
Hashtags and social media feed human nature’s desire for the path of least resistance, to want things to be explained as simply as possible.
But the founders of our nation hoped we’d be #ForeverUnited by deliberate contemplative political and judicial systems. Our founders wanted justice and leadership to be driven by facts and not at the mercy of mindless mobs driven by an acceptance of simplified unproven narratives.
This election and a number of current events have taught us that we can easily fall into the well-worn path of the cheap narrative and a presumption of guilt.
Real leadership must demand that we lift our eyes to distant horizons where truth is found in dawn’s light of evidence, facts and real solutions. Innuendo, unproven stories and urban legends about conspiracies, rigged systems or stolen elections only facilitate the easy slide into chaotic mistrust rather than the hard work of finding truth.
Social media and omnipresent hashtags have the potential to either subvert or further the intent of our founders.
At its best social media can unify — promoting justice, exposing truth and demanding accountability from our institutions.
At its worst social media’s acceptance of over-simplified hashtags robs our ability to grasp the subtlest nuances, let alone the more complex issues that we face here and around the world. We must not fall prey to irrational fear and kneejerk distrust undermining belief in the legitimacy of this country’s foundations, ones set by some of the great minds in human history.
We started as a nation of both thought and action. We have been and can be a nation with the intellectual curiosity to think for ourselves, to be an informed citizenry. Our challenge on Nov. 9 will be to put down the hashtags we used to divide us as people and to work toward the more perfect union that has always been the calling of our great country.
